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I was defending my base, and I stopped to get in a little extra target practice at the training facility when I noticed something about the firing range...

Hello everyone! April is now over and it's time for our monthly Xenonauts 2 progress update. Milestone 4: We've now done the bulk of the work on Milestone 4 and we've started internal testing on the updated campaign. Assuming there's no major issues we'll probably be releasing an early version of the build to the public early next week to get feedback - but initially this will be on our Protoype branches, as the build is currently too rough even for the Experimental branches. After a couple of weeks of polish the build should migrate to the Experimental branches, and hopefully into full public release on the normal Steam / GOG / Epic branches by the end of the month. Aside from the headline features for the build (Androns and the Harvester UFO for the aliens, the Colossus Battlesuit for the humans) we've got a long list of changes that should continue to improve the usability, balance, performance and stability of the game! Sound Design: Last month we brought an experienced sound designer onto the team to work on the game audio, as earlier in development we hadn't had the time and funds to give it the attention it deserved. Audio is sometimes an unappreciated part of game development, as the benefits of good sound effects can be quite subtle but are nonetheless very important. This month we've updated the strategy UI, creating nicer sounds for the standard click / hover / error actions and then adding new clips so give subtly different feedback for different actions a click can cause (like confirming an action, closing a window, opening a tooltip, etc). There's still a bit more work to be done on the UI sounds, but after that we'll be moving onto the tactical combat sounds and trying to give the different alien species a bit more character. As a side-effect of this process, we've also noticed various places the game didn't have sound but needed it. Some of these are already fixed in Milestone 4, e.g. now Medikits and the Automed Unit play a sound when healing a unit, and melee weapons play a sound if they miss the target. Levels & Environment Art: As Milestone 4 contains over thirty new maps, we've also brought on a fulltime freelance environment artist to help us improve the variety and quality of our tactical environments. We worked on an assortment of smaller tasks last month ranging from improving the ATLAS Base command room assets (wall screens and the command table) to fixing up some of the assets for the Alien Base maps, but once those were complete we began to focus on the Farm biome. Our plan is to add some new terrain objects and update some of the ground textures for the Farm to try and make the maps feel a bit more like a real agricultural environment, and then we'll be moving onto the Tropical biome to do the same thing (as there's not really enough tiles to do the inhabited areas of the Tropical maps properly right now). Once that's done, we'll be able to move onto our final biome - the Soviet Town terror maps! Alien Crews: This month we updated the crews for all the various UFOs / alien ground missions to ensure there was a steady escalation of new enemies throughout the campaign. The addition of Androns means we now have enough units to group the alien races together, so each species now has a dedicated secondary support unit and a terror unit. As part of this task we've added "heavy" variants of the Mentarch, Servitor and Cyberdrone that are tougher and have more powerful weapons, which start appearing towards the end of the campaign. We'll be adding new artwork and 3D models for these units in the next month or two. General Improvements: We've also made an assortment of improvements to other parts of the game. The air combat now supports weapons that are capable of shooting down missiles and we've added a new late-game escort UFO that provides an alternative to the alien Interceptor. We've added support for transferring scientists and engineers between bases. We've added a new soldier module that gives soldiers a 180-degree vision arc. We've made further improvements to the loading times, added many small usability features, and added various small new bits of content to the game. So overall it's been a busy month for us, with lots of good progress made. Thanks for reading and we'll hopefully have Milestone 4 in your hands soon!

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This is our first test build for Milestone 3, and we're releasing it to test for stability issues that may have occurred as a result of us upgrading the game to use a newer version of Unity. The new content is included but still unpolished at this stage; we'll be finishing that off and starting to test that properly next week (assuming there's no widespread technical issues as a result of the Unity upgrade). KEY CHANGES: New Content: The playable time for the campaign has been extended to 260 days (from 180 days), during which time the Cruiser UFO will begin to spawn. This contains or unlocks several new pieces of content: Cruiser UFO (with two interior layout variants) Alien Fusion Weapons Xenonaut Fusion Weapons The Gemini interceptor The Pegasus dropship The ARES (an improved version of the MARS) At present we only have research text / art for some of these projects; the remainder will be finished by the end of next week. Unity 2022: We've upgraded Xenonauts 2 to run on Unity 2022, which is a much more modern version of Unity than we were previously using. We've tested the game pretty heavily at this end and fixed most of the bugs we encountered, but now we need to see how the game works on a wider selection of hardware. Please give the game a test and let us know if you encounter any issues! Borderless Fullscreen: Borderless Fullscreen mode should now be properly supported in Xenonauts 2. The monitor resolution settings are now handled natively by Unity 2022 rather than through our own code so we'd appreciate it if people can give this feature a test and see if it is working as intended, particularly if you have multiple monitors or some kind of unusual hardware setup. Faster Loading: Load times should now be reduced by about 30% across all sections of the game, and we're hoping to reduce this by another 10%-20% in Milestone 4. However, please remember that this is an Experimental build and it has lots of extra logging that slow load times - for now, this is likely to cancel out any improvements compared to the "normal" build on the default branches! We've also taken the opportunity to move the tactical mission briefing onto the loading screen, rather than showing it at the start of the mission. This gives you something to read while the mission loads, and allows you to get into the action faster once the load is complete! AI Improvements: We've spent a lot of time working on the AI for this update, improving both the general decision-making of the AI and addressing various specific issues that have been affecting gameplay like: Civilians are now much less suicidal. Melee units (especially Reapers) should make better decisions. AI units will no longer just stand in fire / smoke until they die or pass out. The AI will now open doors even if the tile on the other side is blocked by another unit, allowing them to shoot at Xenonauts camping doors. Pre-Mission Soldier Equip / Arrangement: One frequently requested feature was to add a button on the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen that allows the player to easily access the screen where they can set the positions of their soldiers within the dropship. We've now implemented this, allowing you to easily switch back and forth between these screens prior to launching a dropship. "Sell Junk Items" button: We've also added a button on the base stores screen that will set all "junk" items (e.g. items that are not used in research / engineering projects) to sell at maximum quantity. In future we may expand this system to allow autoselling items immediately after the mission, or we may add in a system where the reduced sale prices of items will increase over time (giving players an incentive not to always sell their junk immediately). Bleeding Wound Healing & Bleeding Aliens: Aliens can now suffer Bleeding Wounds when they take damage in the same way that Xenonauts do. However, each Bleeding Wound now have a 25% chance of healing and disappearing after it inflicts damage at the end of the turn. Unconscious units will now also continue to suffer damage from any bleeding wounds they suffered while conscious, and may die as a result. Mission Updates & Balancing: We did a balance pass on the early game as part of our AI testing. A number of tweaks have been made to reflect the fact Convoy Ambush missions felt a little too easy, whereas the second Abduction Site mission, the Cleaner Leader Elimination missions and any early Base Defence missions felt harder than other missions. We've also made a number of changes to specific mission types: Abduction missions: Abduction missions no longer end immediately when the abduction tubes disappear; the mission will now continue until all alien forces are eliminated (effectively these are now deathmatch missions with a time-limited optional objective). This change was made because many players reported that the abrupt ending of the mission in previous versions could feel quite jarring. You still gain Alien Alloys for each abduction tube you disable, but now you also gain -1 Panic in the local region for each surviving civilian that you released. The timer on abduction tubes has been reduced by 2 turns (from 8 turns to 6 turns). There's now a teleport animation when the tubes disappear. Data Raid missions: These are the missions where you have to capture a certain number of Data Sticks from Cleaner computers. These have now been updated so victory is triggered off the number of computers you have interacted with (i.e. sabotaged), rather than how many Data Sticks you have brought back to the dropship. This change is unlikely to affect too many players, and was made because having a retreating soldier killed while carrying Data Sticks could completely ruin a mission. In most cases the mission will play out exactly the same as it did before. We've added a new UI element for this mission that shows how many Data Stick items are being carried by each soldier. The objectives now show how many turns remaining until the enemy reinforcements start appearing. Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn, unless the mission is encountered in month 1. Extract VIP missions: At the start of the mission, the camera shows the empty dropship you are trying to reach before panning to the starting positions of your soldiers. This gives the player clarity over which direction they need to travel at the start of the mission. The VIP is now automatically added to your team at the start of the mission (rather than the player having to click on them). The VIP now has 50 TU rather than 40 TU. Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn (from 9 to 8) The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing. Soldier Rescue missions: Many players did not appear to understand that you were expected to leave 3 free slots in your dropship on this mission, which gave you space to pick up the 3 soldiers that needed to be rescued. We have therefore added them to the dropship as "ghost soldiers" that fill those dropship slots (this means you can also view their stats prior to the mission). We've also updated the logic about which soldiers are recovered if the player does not leave those 3 free slots in their dropship. The game will now always pick living soldiers over dead soldiers (irrespective of their origin), and will prefer your existing soldiers to those you are supposedly trying to rescue. Eliminate VIP mission: On Eliminate VIP missions, the camera will now pan to the VIP and show a message reading "VIP Sighted" when you see the target. It will also show a "VIP Eliminated" or "VIP Stunned" message at the appropriate points. The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing. MINOR BALANCE CHANGES: We found that soldiers were becoming too strong too quickly in previous builds and this problem was just getting worse as we extended the length of the campaign. We've therefore taken several steps to slow down soldier progression a little: Starting values for soldier attributes are now capped at 65 (previously 70) Starting soldiers are now Privates rather than Corporals. Reduced the speed at which soldiers gain combat experience to about 60% of the previous level. The training speed of the Training Room has been halved (both the starting value and the gain from completing Interrogation projects). It is no longer possible to see doors opening or closing under the fog of war, as this made the position of alien units very obvious. These doors will now only visually update when one of your units sees them. Sectons now trigger their Psionic Triangulation accuracy bonus from being near Psyons, not by being near other Sectons. However, if the Psyon is killed (and no other Psyon is nearby) the Secton will now immediately panic and lose all remaining TU. Duration of crash sites reduced from 72 hours to 32 hours. Medikit weight increased to 25 (from 15). Construction time of Radar Array reduced from 20 days to 15 days. Using a healing item will no longer trigger enemy reaction fire. Enabled reaction fire on the various alien melee weapons (mantids, sebillians, reapers, mentarch, zombies). Air Combat balancing: Reduced construction cost of missiles / torpedoes by 20% Reduced upkeep for Angel from $100k to $75k per month Reduced upkeep for Phantom from $150k to $120k per month Destroyer UFO increased to 200HP (from 175). Fighter UFO turn rate increased by 50%. Fighter Cannon armour destruction increased to 2-5 (from 0-3). Abductor UFO increased to 275HP (from 250). Abductor Cannon range increased by 10%, armour destruction increased from 1-3 to 3-5, and reload time reduced from 0.75 sec to 0.5 sec. Projectile speed slowed down by 33%. Alien Interceptor Missiles armour destruction increased to 3-7 (from 0-4). MINOR GAMEPLAY / CONTENT CHANGES: Added a number of new maps for Terror Sites / ATLAS Base / Cleaner Data Raid / Convoy Ambush / Rescue VIP missions. Added new 3D models for the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle, Accelerated Shotgun, Accelerated LMG, Alloy Shield, Stun Gun and Stun Baton. Added new 2D inventory tile art for the melee knife and the HEVY Smoke Rounds. Added Fusion weapons to the game. For any Kickstarter backers who saw the old incarnation of these weapons, we've updated the designs of the Shotgun and LMG and also given each weapon a unique ammo battery design. Added proper melee animations for the Mantid and Sebillian units. Units now play an injury sound and injury animation when struck with a stun weapon that does not inflict damage. Soldiers should now hide their carried weapon when performing their ladder climb animation. It is now possible to use any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters in soldier / aircraft / base names. Moved a check that was preventing a player launching an empty dropship from the Launch Aircraft screen to the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen instead (i.e. after you've had a chance to fill the dropship with soldiers). Stopping chance 0% objects are no longer highlighted on the fire path. Added a basic sort order system to the soldier loadout profiles. Units that can crush terrain now do not crush an open double door when they pass through it (most noticable inside UFOs and in Alien Base missions). The MARS now shows a custom "cannot interact" cursor when hovering over a mission objective item (like a computer desk) that soldiers can interact with but vehicles cannot. BUGFIXES: Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to run a building upgrade project when having a large number of buildings (most commonly occurred with the Gauss Battery Upgrade project). Reloading a weapon in the tactical inventory now correctly plays the reload sound. Fixed a bug where the text on UFO information pop-ups was not being displayed for users playing in Chinese / Japanese / Korean. Fixed a bug where Unassigned soldiers are not showing certain items on their paperdoll image on the Soldier Equip screen (jetpacks, MARS weapons, etc). Fixed soldiers sometimes not being removed from the dropship even when reduced to below 50% HP. Fixed a bug where the Autofill Dropship button on the Soldier Equip screen could bypass the dropship vehicle limit. Fixed a bug where Senty Guns were incorrectly showing on the Soldier Equip screen in secondary bases (they should only appear before Base Defence missions, as that's the only time they can be used). Fixed a bug where the soldier paperdoll could get blurred if a certain combination of items were equipped Fixed a bug where the soldier portrait could disappear on the dropship soldier arrangement screen Fixed the bug where grenades could get stuck displaying a 0% hit chance. Fixed a bug where units could stand in mid-air at the top of a ladder. Fixed a bug where you could place two soldiers into the same destination tile if one of them was using a jetpack. Fixed a bug where unconscious units could not be revived with a medikit, Fixed a bug where the shoot/move preview hit calculations was not accurately updating the value for Wraith Cloaking Field based on the new soldier location being previewed. Fixed a bug where TU values could end up with a decimal point after a Berserk action. Fixed a bug where suppressing an enemy unit with reaction fire would not stop them finishing their planned movement. Fixed a bug where crouching during the pre-battle deployment phase on cerrtain missions cost TU, and did not refund it if you stood up. Fixed a bug where the crouch keyboard shortcut ("C") did not work during the pre-battle deployment phase. Fixed a bug where the combat shield was not disappearing after being destroyed. Fixed a bug where certain weapons could not be picked up from the ground after being dropped. Fixed certain objective items (mostly the computer desks) being incorrectly rotated in some situations. Fixed the Bleeding Wounds counter being displayed vertically if the unit has more than 10 Bleeding Wounds. Fixed the open door mouse cursor remaining active on the menu if you press Esc while hovering over a door. Fixed a visual issue where the green deployment area tiles could sometimes remain after the end of the deployment phase. Fixed throwing a grenade / flare onto the roof of a building causing windows on the floor below to shatter. Fixed some visual issues with the restaurant sign in the Western Town terror maps. Fixed a number of bugs with the Ultimate Power achievement (bring all Colonels to a mission).

Hello everyone - it's time for the November development update for Xenonauts 2. Read on to see what we were working on last month! Milestone 5 Prototype Update: November was a productive month for us. All the core systems for Milestone 5 are now complete and we're currently in the process of testing the initial prototype, which we'll hopefully be releasing onto the Experimental branch later this week. As always, the first Experimental build for a new Milestone is likely to be a pretty rough experience - although all the major new gameplay mechanics are present there'll probably be a lot of bugs, balance issues, and missing pieces of content that need to be patched in. If you'd rather have a more polished experience then it'd be best to wait until the final version of Milestone 5 arrives on the standard branches early next year! Before we move on, I just want to be clear - although players will be able to unlock the final mission and complete the campaign once Milestone 5 is out, this will not be the final update for Xenonauts 2. We still want to add more polish to the game, so we're planning another major update before final release (likely focusing on usability / visual improvements / AI & game balance / modding / etc rather than adding additional game mechanics). The Testing Process: Most of our work this month has been addressing the numerous gameplay and stability issues encountered in our testing. Each new batch of fixes has allowed us to play further into the game, and we're currently testing the last month or two of the campaign (so fighting Battleships and doing the final mission). So far we've been doing "strategic" playthroughs that involve auto-winning the tactical battles for speed (the average campaign is 30+ missions), but once we confirm it's possible to complete a "strategic" playthrough we'll shift to playing a full campaign including the tactical missions. Most game-breaking stability / balance issues tend to occur on the strategy layer, so hopefully this will go smoothly - but whether we release the prototype this week as planned really comes down to how many issues we encounter. One major benefit of this testing is that all of these campaign playthroughs have given us plenty of opportunity to playtest and iterate the new strategy mechanics. We actually found the first iteration of the new Geoscape mechanics weren't quite as engaging as we'd hoped, so we expanded them a bit more and came up with something stronger! Updated Geoscape Mechanics: I personally think the updated Geoscape mechanics are a major improvement on what we have before, giving the player more things to interact with and a wider selection of possible strategies without being too overwhelming. Players now gain a certain number of Operations Points per day (representing the off-screen work carried out Xenonaut agents), which can be spent on Strategic Operations or recruiting Supporters. Strategic Operations provide powerful instant effects, such as allowing the player to reduce Panic in a specific region or receive some extra cash / alien materials. They are not the most efficient way to spend Operations Points, but can still be very useful in the right circumstances! Each of the six funding regions contains four Supporters, which represent key figures in the local government who can become aligned with either the Xenonauts or the Aliens. If they fall under Alien control and become Infiltrators (usually caused by successful Infiltration UFO missions), they will generate additional Panic in the local region each month - but if convinced to join the Xenonauts they will instead slightly reduce Panic in that region each month and provide a permanent bonus to your organisation. Additionally, each region has a unique "region bonus" that is unlocked if you recruit all the supporters in that region (e.g. the North America bonus improves the quality of your starting soldiers, while the Soviet Russia one reduces your upkeep costs, etc). However, most regions also contain a single Elite Supporter who provides double the bonus of other Supporters of the same type; prioritising recruiting these Elite Supporters from the various different regions can be an alternative to racing towards a specific region bonus. Although I think these additions work well, my own personal opinion only counts for so much - we'll be really interested to hear what the community think of the new systems once the prototype is out! Other Additions: We also had time to work on a few miscellaneous things this month. Firstly, the tactical combat now properly supports objects falling, so we've been able to enable destruction on building roofs. Explosions can now collapse these and cause units and items to fall onto the level below. The illustration work is now complete on the updated Research screen background art (see above), and this month we'll be creating the "advanced" versions of this that are unlocked as you progress through the game and gain access to more advanced technology. We're continuing to revamp the visuals of some of the weaker parts of the tactical combat. We started work on some new models for the Sebillian aliens, and we've also updated the appearance of quite a few assets in the Farm biome. Neither of these updates are currently present in Milestone 5 but both should be patched in before we finalise it. We've made some further AI improvements and written some custom AI for the new missions added in Milestone 5, one of which is a wave defence mission. A few updated sounds have been added to the tactical combat for the new Biter alien, and also some new unique movement sounds for the MARS / ARES / Sentry Gun vehicles. We also set up the proper Game Over screen for the various types of victory and loss. The final victory cinematic isn't ready yet, but the new UI has unique art / text / music / campaign stats / etc so still it's a lot more atmospheric than the plain popup you got in earlier versions of the game. I think that covers everything. Well done for reading the wall of text, and hopefully we'll have a prototype ready to play in the next few days!

We've released the first "prototype" build for Milestone 4 on our Experimental branch (instructions on how to access it here). Please be aware this build is rather rough and exists mostly to help us track down bugs while we finish working on the new content we're adding for this Milestone. To make this easier, we've added a new bug reporter tool which you can access by pressing F11 - this automatically creates a zip file containing the game logs and recent saves so you can easily attach it to a forum / discord bug report, ensuring we always have all the information we need! Summary of Changes: This update has added content to the end of the campaign (which we're still working on), and made a number of improvements to usability and game balance based on player feedback from Milestone 3. As you can see from the changelog below, there's been quite a few changes - and I'm in the process of testing and revising the new game balance. Please let us know what you think so far - in general money should be more plentiful, and I think things should feel smoother and better balanced up until when Abductors start spawning. The strategy layer has had more testing than the tactical combat so far so please let us know about any difficulty spikes you encounter. We've created dedicated feedback threads for the game balance, and also for stupid AI behaviour. If you see the AI doing any clearly suboptimal moves, please post a save file and a quick description of the issue in that thread so we can adjust it to behave better. New Gameplay Content: Harvester UFOs now appear at the end of the campaign. These are large and heavily-armoured transport UFOs with two different interior layouts and sizeable crews, but contains significant amounts of Alloys and Alenium. Only the Battleship (due in Milestone 5) is larger and more powerful! Androns have been re-introduced into the game with new models and animations. These formidable robotic alien soldiers have very high armour but relatively low HP, and appear as support units for Wraiths on Terror missions and inside larger UFOs. The Colossus Battlesuit is now available for the player to build. This is unlocked from the Harvester, and provides the highest Armour level in the game as well as a Strength boost and the ability to walk through walls. However, it has several disadvantages - it cannot use modules, is limited to carrying only machineguns, and has shorter sight ranges compared to other armours. It is therefore very powerful in an assault role, but needs to be accompanied by soldiers with different equipment that can make up for its shortcomings. At present this armour is relatively similar to the Predator from the first Xenonauts (except it has shorter sight range, rather than a narrower vision cone), and we'll be considering how we can make it more distinct - community suggestions on this topic are welcome! We've added a large number of new maps, including: ~30 large Crashsite maps across all biomes that will be used the new Harvester UFO 5 new Alien Base maps (2 small, 3 medium) 1 new map for the Cleaner Base mission 1 new map for the Cleaner Data Raid missions We're testing a new escort UFO called the Defender which is similar in strength to the Interceptor UFO, but behaves differently as it is designed to engage at long range. We're currently unsure if we're going to keep it or not, so let us know what you think of it. Added Heavy Mentarch, Heavy Servitor, Heavy Cyberdrone, and Reaper Alpha variants of existing units to the later stages of the campaign. These have improved stats. but only the Reaper Alpha currently has a unique model (we're working on the others). Added a new "Sentinel Module" that soldiers can equip (unlocked from Harvesters), which gives them 180-degree vision cones. Added the Reinforced Shield, which is the final upgrade for the Combat Shield and Assault Shield. Added the Energy Knife weapon, which is an upgraded version of the Combat Knife (unlocked from Alien Electronics). Added new Corpse Analysis engineering projects for the Servitor and Andron enemies. Visual / Audio Updates: The Probe UFO now has unique artwork both in the air combat and on the associated Research projects. The unarmoured Sectons that appear in the first mission (and subsequently inside UFOs) have been retextured. Wraith noncombatants have been retextured, and now have a basic jumpsuit uniform rather than being naked. The command room in the ATLAS Base mission has been visually improved, with a proper command table and wall screens that better resemble those on the main menu artwork. Added new models for the human Fusion Shotgun and Fusion Sniper Rifle weapons. Added art for the Nanofabrication research project. Added new art for the Servitor wreckage item. Added improved weapon silhouettes for ballistic / accelerated weapons (these are used in the little minitabs at the top of the tactical UI). Added a number of new sounds to the game: Complete refresh of the existing strategy UI sounds Added pick up / drop sounds for different item types that are used when you are moving items around in soldier inventories, or switching weapons in the tactical combat Added heal sounds for when various healing items are used (medikit, automed unit, servitor auto-heal ray) Added sounds for a melee weapon miss Abduction tubes now play the teleport animation and teleport sound when they disappear midway through an Abduction mission due to the timer expiring. Balance Changes - Strategy: The invasion has been tweaked so that the player needs to run fewer missions in the first couple of months of the campaign. The appearance of Scout UFOs and Destroyer UFOs has been moved forward slightly, and the Cleaner storyline now takes a bit longer to resolve (over the same number of missions). This means the time spent using each equipment tech tier is more even, rather than having lots of missions fighting with the Warden and Accelerated weapons and then being rushed through the later equipment tiers. Funding has been rebalanced so now 50% of your funding is modified by the Panic score in local regions, and shooting down UFOs now grants a small global Panic reduction in addition to the larger local Panic reduction. This restores the link between managing Panic levels and your funding, but ensures the player is not obliged to immediately rush interceptor coverage across the whole globe on higher difficulty settings. Base structures are now more expensive in general, but the Medical Center and Training Room are now much more expensive. The logic here is that these structures are upgrades that improve your soldiers and make tactical combat somewhat easier; it should be a decision whether a player builds them early or instead puts that money towards new interceptors / radar coverage. Two additional plot objectives added to the campaign: capture an alien officer, and capture an alien leader. These unlock research projects that advance the plot and raise funding when complete. Aircraft now take longer to build and are more expensive, and have reduced fuel range on the Geoscape. However, their equipment is cheaper (see below) and they now have a sell price of 50% of their construction cost when sold. Aircraft equipment is no longer individually constructed in the workshop. Starting equipment and weapons are unlimited quantity, and these can be globally upgraded to higher tiers via engineering projects. You no longer pay upkeep costs on aircraft that are still under construction, or queued in the engineering project list. Air Combat - we've tweaked the stats of several UFOs downwards to account for the fact they appear a little earlier in the game. We've also fixed two bugs that will change the balance of the air combat: The difficulty modifier (set on the Campaign Settings) was previously broken, but will now correctly increase / decrease the damage inflicted by UFO weapons. Autoresolved air combat was previously still using the UFO HP / Armour modifiers based on the number of interceptors used (making UFOs easier if you had 1 plane, and harder if you had 3). Gameplay Changes - Strategy: We've added a new "bug reporter" tool which you can access by pressing F11. This will create a .zip file which contains all recent logs and saves, and can easily be attached to any bug report on the Discord or our forums to ensure we have all the information we need (it'll also prompt you about this after a crash). Several updates to make soldier planned loadouts on the Soldier Equip screen (i.e. the loadouts of soldiers that aren't in the dropship) more intuitive and useful: A pop-up message is now generated if you assign new soldiers to the dropship and the base stores does not have enough items to fill their planned loadout (which leads to soldiers not having some items equipped). Item quantities on the Soldier Equip screen now display as "X / Y" where X is the number currently in the base stores, and Y is the total number you own (including any equipped on your soldiers). You can now drag items into planned loadouts even if the base stores contains 0 of those items. If players attempt a second mission without returning to base, equipment is now re-issued to all surviving soldiers in the squad in a round robin method (using everything recovered from the mission site). Previously the first soldier would take all items set in their loadout, then the second, etc - which would lead to issues where there weren't enough ammo magazines for later soldiers to load their weapons, while the first soldier had several extra in their belt. The generic soldier icons on the dropship soldier arrangement screen have now been replaced by soldier role icons, which should make it much easier to tell your soldiers apart. Injured soldiers and wounded soldiers now use different colours in the Soldier Equip screen, making the two states easier to distinguish between. Added the building tooltip to the Main Base screen building list. After completing a Corpse Analysis engineering project which unlocks further engineering projects, the popup now offers to take you to the Engineering screen rather than the Research screen. Added a black background to the strategy UI that will be revealed if people play on ultra-ultra-widescreen monitors (i.e. anything more than 21:9 aspect ratio). The "Choose Aircraft Name" panel now has a cancel button, and can be closed by pressing Esc. Updated the tooltip on the Select Soldier button shown on empty dropship slots on Soldier Equip screen. Updated the tooltip on button confirming aircraft relocation. Air Combat - the first interceptor is now automatically selected when you begin a battle. Air Combat - the rotation arc for UFO weapons that are capable of rotating is now displayed. Air Combat - hovering over either Evasive Roll button now displays a "ghost" plane that shows where the interceptor will end up. Air Combat - different UFOs / aircraft may now have different cooldowns for evasive roll. Air Combat - the sizes of UFOs in the air combat has been updated to improve their relative scale is correct. Air Combat - this now supports weapons that can shoot down missiles Bugfixes - Strategy: Fixed the air combat maps sometimes containing aircraft deployment regions that don't disappear when the battle begins. Fixed the flicker on the Soldier Equip screen that would occur in the bottom left list before you access the screen for the first time. The Guardian "Heavy Armour" module now correctly remembers whether it was enabled or disabled when changing armour (like the heavy armour modules for other armours do). Fixed the soldier HP bar that is shown on hover on the Dropship soldier arrangement screen showing inconsistent values when you switch between soldiers. Fixed an issue where redirecting an aircraft in flight would not spawn the multi-select box if you clicked a target in close proximity to another possible target. Aircraft icon no longer disappears if aircraft circumnavigates the map more than once in a single direction Fixed wounded soldiers in the dropship visually having no armour while travelling back to base. Fixed the mission information UI incorrectly displaying some dummy information if you have built a Quantum Array. Fixed clicking-and-holding to move map while in Geoscape base construction mode acting placing the base when you release the mouse. Fixed the Geoscape nightshadow not extending all the way to the bottom of the map. Destroyed Xenonaut bases on the Geoscape no longer prevent the player building another base nearby. Fixed there being spots in the Soldier list where the mouse scrollwheel would not allow you to scroll the list. Fixed the inverted keybinds when scrolling through different aircraft on the Aircraft screen. Fixed a bug where the Aircraft screen topbar would be hidden if you built a new base and then went directly to the Aircraft screen. Fixed pressing Esc on the Transfer Items screen not returning to the Geoscape like it does on other strategy UI screens. Fixed the Soldier Equip screen starting the the Equipment tab selected in the Armory, not the Weapons tab. Fixed custom loadout names not having a maximum length (now limited to 20 characters). Fixed a few strings that were not being correctly translated. Fixed incorrect proportions on Canadian flag. Balance Changes - Tactical Combat: Melee weapon hit chances no longer 100% by default, and are now affected by Reflexes. The base accuracy of melee weapons is about 60%, and this is increased or decreased based on the difference between the attacker and defender's Reflexes (the Accuracy stat is not a factor in the calculation). This means attacking inanimate objects always has a 100% hit chance. Most weapons now have an increased hit chance at very short range, as weapons now gain more of their accuracy from proximity rather than soldier Accuracy. Generally the hit chance is about +10% higher at point blank than it was previously, which should make burst fire more effective. Rifle / LMG - increased short range bonus by 0.5% per tile for 20 tiles, decreased Accuracy multiplier by 5% on each fire mode (-3% hit chance at 60% Accuracy) Shotgun - range reduced from 10 tiles to 9 tiles, short range bonus increased from 6.25% per tile to 7.5% per tile (makes it slightly more effective within 5 tiles, slightly less effective beyond 5 tiles - but relatively minor overall) Pistol - short range bonus increased from 2.25% to 3% over 12 tiles, and accuracy multuplier reduced by 5% Sniper - these weapons are unaffected. Stunned Xenonaut soldiers equipped with an Automed Unit will now automatically revive themselves when it triggers at end of turn. MARS and other robotic units no longer suffer Accuracy reduction due to injury. VIPs no longer gain flares in night missions. Various updates made to the alien invasion: The aliens in each UFOs / ground missions have been updated to improve consistency. There are now three main alien races (Psyons, Sebillians, Wraiths) with different supporting units for each species - although in Alien Base missions you can encounter enemies of any type. Abduction misisons now contain Cleaners as well as aliens until the Cleaner HQ is destroyed. The number of aliens is reduced if Cleaners are present, but overall the missions get slightly easier once the Cleaner HQ is destroyed. The aliens in the Cleaner HQ mission no longer have Plasma weapons unless it's past day 120, as this was unlocking the corresponding tech earlier than expected. Various updates made to specific weapons: LMGs no longer lose accuracy after the soldier has moved for the first time each turn Reduced the weight of the knife so it is no longer heavier than the pistol. Reduced the suppression on the Stun Gun from 23 to 15 Various updates made to specific aliens: Wraith "Cloaking Field" ability now reduces the shooter's Accuracy, rather than inflicting a flat penalty on overall Hit Chance, and Hit Chance from close range bonus is not affected. This change means that weapons with a naturally low hit chance (e.g. burst fire weapons) are no longer affected much worse than high-accuracy weapons, and the player can still negate the effect by getting closer to the Wraith. Psyon Officers and Psyon Leaders are now equipped with a Psi-Amp weapon, which acts like a Plasma Pistol Pistol but completely ignores armour (which also means it does not damage armour). We'll likely expand this in Milestone 5 so Bravery or Morale offer some kind of defence against it. Various updates made to specific missions, generally to improve the rewards offered or make time limits a bit less punishing: Alien Base missions are now treated as night missions. All Abduction missions now have a base duration of 7 turns (first mission previously had 6, all others had 8) Eliminate VIP missions now have 2 turns longer before enemy reinforcements arrive, and they now give a $200k rewards for victory. VIP Extraction missions now have 1 turn longer before enemy reinforcements arrive, and have 1 fewer enemy. They also now give a $200k reward for victory. The soldiers you are rescuing in the Rescue Soldier missions are now each also carrying a Briefcase of Money (value: $50,000). Cleaner Base now awards 50 Alloys and 50 Alenium on completion. Gameplay Changes - Tactical Combat: The Toggle Roof button is now functional and the visual behaviour of roofs has changed. Now roofs are shown by default, and will hide automatically when a soldier gains vision over any tile inside the building (previously roofs would always be hidden if you had the camera at level 1). After clicking the Toggle Roof button, the roof visibility will be forced on. Moved the civilian / local forces turn to be before the alien turn, which means it's now possible for the local forces to save your troops from being killed by aliens. Local forces should no longer be interested in going inside UFOs. Cover objects with walkable floor tiles on top (shipping containers, caravans, buses, etc) are now linked in terms of destruction, which means destroying the object will remove the walkable tiles. Units stood on these tiles will fall to the ground. Updated the camera behaviour when enemy reinforcements arrive - it now scrolls through any newly spawned enemy units. Updated the camera behaviour at end of turn when bleeding wounds, regeneration or the Automed Unit is being used - the camera will now scroll through all affected units in turn and show any healing or damage effects. Updated the way mouse targeting works when units are on top of objects that you cannot go inside (e.g. cliffs, shipping containers) so that you don't have to move the camera up to their level to click on them. Soldiers marked as "done" for the turn in the tactical combat now have a green tick below their minitab Added a kill count for each soldier on the post-mission debrief screen (each kill shown as an alien skull) The Valkyrie dropship now has side doors which automatically open as units pass through them (this does not cost TU). As they have windows, they do not block vision - but they do stop alien reaction fire hitting soldiers still inside the dropship! Climbing a ladder now plays footstep sounds. Melee attacks now occur more quickly after the player clicks the attack button. Improved the auto-pathing when using a melee / heal item on a target several tiles away, so it correctly finds the shortest path and doesn't get confused by intervening walls. Retextured all the various roller doors in the game, and removed all the static roller doors in the Western Town and replaced them with roller doors that can be opened. Stopped open Xenonaut Base / ATLAS Base blast doors triggering the shut door icon, which blocks other click commands. Fixed z-fighting issues with some of the ATLAS base corridor tiles and the fog of war shader. Fixed some alignment issues for the wall corner tiles in the Xenonaut Base / ATLAS Base map Sped up Mentarch firing animation. Optimised the cabbage fields in the Farm maps. Bugfixes - Tactical Combat: Fixed the Western Town restaurant interior walls appearing black on some systems. Fixed the alien base doors sometimes appearing open / shut when they are not. Fixed an issue where the you would get vision into the UFO at the start of the turn if the door had started open, even though it then automatically closed itself. Fixed the adjacent cover system not correctly disallowing other adjacent cover of similar stopping value. Fixed unconscious civilians / local forces being treated as dead in the mission debrief. Fixed unconscious soldiers with bleeding wounds not taking bleed damage. Fixed being able to heal alien units (this allowed players to get into a few situations that could allow crashes). Prevented the player from healing an unconscious unit if there is another unit stood on their tile, as that would lead to two units occupying the same tile. Fixed another example of soldiers being able to occupy the same tile and get stuck inside each other. Fixed an AI issue with Reapers preventing them from attacking in some circumstances. Wraith active camo ability is no longer reset to being active when loading a saved game. Secton Psionic Triangulation glowing eyes can no longer be seen in the shroud in some circumstances. Secton Psionic triangulation no longer incorrectly triggers off other Sectons in some circumstances. Fixed Psyon Mesmerize incorrectly triggering if a shot misses, hits an explosive object and kills the Psyon. Fixed some mission types not generating autosaves on the first turn. Fixed an AI hang that could occur when an alien unit capable of crushing walls encounters a unit on the other side of the wall Fixed an issue where zooming in / out using the keyboard keys could be too fast if you held down the keys. Fixed some ladders on some of the new Polar maps not being climbable. Fixed the unpathable cliffs on the Polar extraction / ambush maps. Fixed some misaligned road tiles in one of the Cleaner Data Raid missions. Fixed several issues with the Ambush mission trucks having incorrect loot amounts in certain maps. Fixed the large 4x2 oiltank not being correctly removed when destroyed. Fixed being able to see dead bodies inside the crashed UFO in the shroud before the UFO itself becomes visible. Fixed the abduction tubes on Abduction missions being visible in the shroud. Fixed TU reserve mode being left enabled on a weapon after a panicking soldier drops it Fixed TU reserve mode being visually disabled after enemy overwatch occurs Fixed an issue where a teleporter doesn't trigger due to enemy reaction fire occuring as a unit steps onto a teleporter, but the camera still moved up to the higher level as if it had. Fixed an issue where recovering the body of a dead soldier wouldn't also recover the equipped armour on that body (this only applies on lower difficulty settings where armour is not destroyed on death). Fixed the Cleaner reinforcements coming one turn too early for the linked conversation on the Cleaner Data Raid missions. Fixed an issue where the three "On Mission" soldiers would get permanently stuck in the dropship after returning to base if you flew to a Soldier Extraction mission site, then aborted the mission and returned to base. Fixed the camera panning from the dropship objective to the spawn position of your squad on VIP extraction missions also incorrectly happening after loading a save game. Fixed instances where units suffering TU penalties due to insufficient carrying capacity would also have their weapon TU fire costs reduced. Fixed pressing Esc while hovering over an enemy in tactical combat not opening the game menu. Fixed missions incorrectly ending immediately when spawned enemies still remain alive (e.g. Reapers spawned from Zombies). Fixed some flickering on the Cruiser UFO's hull dropshadow.

This version is outdated, see announcement for 0.35 instead. Version 0.34.3 of Xenonauts: Community Edition has been released. Installation (Windows Steam users): Switch to the Community branch in Steam by right-clicking on Xenonauts, selecting Properties, going to the Betas tab and selecting Community. No access code is needed. You can enable/disable mods in "Modding Tools" in the game launcher. You can revert to the standard official game by switching back to the NONE branch in Steam. Installation (other users): 1. Download the base mod and the mod package. 2. Launch the old version of the game, install the base mod using Modding Tools. Alternatively: extract the base mod into assets/mods/xce, overwriting everything. 3. Exit the game launcher. 4. Run the new executable from assets/mods/xce. It should display the version 0.34.3. Using this launcher, go to Modding Tools and install the mod pack. Say Yes when asked about overwriting mods. 5. You can now play from assets/mods/xce, or optionally copy the files to the main game installation folder. What is the relation between X:CE 0.34.3 and Xenonauts 1.6x? The official Xenonauts releases incorporate some features/fixes from an older X:CE version, and some have intentionally not been included. X:CE 0.34.3 should contain all relevant Xenonauts 1.6x fixes and new features. If you already play X:CE, there should be no advantage to switching to Xenonauts 1.6x. X:CE 0.34 can read saved games from Xenonauts 1.5x or Xenonauts 1.6x, but Xenonauts 1.6x cannot read normal X:CE 0.34.2 saved games. Switching option saveCompatibility in assets/gameconfig.xml to "gh15x" before running X:CE should produce saves in a format that Xenonauts 1.5x or 1.6x can read (keep the option as "xce" for normal play, otherwise some new X:CE values may not be kept in save files). Note that Xenonauts 1.6x may still be unable to load such a saved game if it includes objects it doesn't know (e.g. researches from the Lore+ mod, or incendiary grenades from X:CE). Changes from 0.34.2: This version has some stability improvements and updates to the bundled mods. System The game is now large address aware. This allows better stability / performance with very big mods. Sound effects are now stored uncompressed in memory. This only uses a bit more memory but should significantly improve sound-related stability problems, such as freezes due to ambient sounds and similar issues. Bug fixes Corrected loading of psionic defence values in saved games. Fixed the delete button in the modding tools with relation to the Steam Workshop. Prevented a freeze during ground combat if a map with a bugged door is encountered (door that opens into a wall). Fixed loading of some saved games that get corrupted by having incorrectly "cloned" planes. When retaking Xenonaut bases is enabled, fixed problem of that not applying to undefended bases. Fixed some UFO loot in the Furies mod. Modding In config.xml, a variable has been added (MeleeVehiclePriorityModifier) to tweak the priority with which melee aliens attack vehicles. The default value does not change gameplay. Modded Xenopedia screens can now display more information about combat armour suits. Included Mods Xenonauts Fix Pack by Policenaut has been updated with multiple fixes, with credit to Charon. Tropical and Swamp tileset - updated from version 1.6 to 1.61. This version is significantly more stable.

On my first game, with my first base. And the Cleaner's HQ was only revealed to me after going through the missions to get their data like you're supposed to. I can only assume that they've also been wholly unaware that our HQs were right next door to each other all along.

Even at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to once again criticize tactical maps we currently have in X2. Many of them still feel like shooting galleries instead of real places. Maps need more: Verticality Visual story telling. Have the map itself say something about what has happened. Does this place feel like a real place or a map in a game? Larger, more interesting buildings with many floors. More urban maps. (tends to be more interesting than a random jungle) Variable pacing: large open areas -> tight close quarters. Better "paths" through an area with sense of progress. Need of surveying the area -> Seeing an alien in a third floor window - how can I get there? Completely different map layout styles within a single biome so they wouldn't feel so samey. Having more complex maps will really benefit the game by giving players more interesting scenarios to play through. I checked the old X1 maps I made back in the day. You can maybe see and feel the vibe in these screenshots I'm looking for:

With Xenonauts-2 launching into Early Access, it's time to briefly explain all the new content we are planning to add on our journey towards final release! The list below explains our priorities, but it's not exhaustive as there's also lots of small improvements planned that aren't big enough to get their own bullet point. We'll also be listening to community feedback during the Early Access period, so this list may change or expand accordingly - if you want to see something else added, please feel free to suggest it! Additional Tactical Maps Soviet Town Biome Air Combat Revamp Alien / Civilian AI Revamp Cruiser UFO Harvester UFO Battleship UFO Operation ENDGAME Ending Cinematic Alien - Androns Alien - Reaper Bull Alien - Eternal Alien Psionics Ultimate Interceptor Ultimate Dropship Ultimate Armour Fusion Weapons Hovertank Mod Tools Fullscreen Borderless Community Suggestions If you have questions about any of the items on the roadmap, please post them up for discussion as a new thread on the general forums.

Greetings all, A little preface here on relative skill level: The issues I want to talk about get more obvious and more of an issue the better a player is, hence this preface. This is sort of an inverse of "Get gud". However, it may appear I am asking to make the game easier in general, that is not the case. I would like the game to be harder if anything, but at the end where it makes sense for it to be hard and not at the beginning where it doesn't. More on that later... A note on my own skill level: I've completed pretty much every decent strategy game on the hardest possible difficulty, that includes games like: XCOM (The originals, terror from the deep excepted as I never got into it), XCOM (The Remakes), Jagged Alliance (even the awful reloaded one), Panzer General, Peoples General, etc. Also, some hard realtime stuff like EUIV (One-tagged the world), Shogun II total war (Impossible Ironmanned it), etc. I also have a youtube where I do hardest possible turn based Ironman campaigns, though that is mostly battletech. If your interested in that or simply want to verify, you can find it at www.youtube.com/TheEdmon and I hope you enjoy it :). My two key issues with XCOM type games are thus: 1) In the early game no-one seems to know there is a war on and it determines everything. 2) Win-More, Lose-More gameplay. The early game: Most of these turns based games are won in the first 6-10 hours and the rest of the game is just a walk to the victory screen, provided you don't make some critical mistake. But if you are winning hard enough, early enough, the odds of a critical mistake drops: 1) You win early missions with no losses and get more stuff. 2) So you have more money to expand, upgrade and research faster, with no losses to replace. 3) You are powering faster than the difficulty curve due to the above and can afford more coverage (when applicible). 4) You win more easily, due to your powering, which leads to less/no future losses and more money. 5) The cycle repeats, with your A-Team carrying you to the victory screen often without any losses at all. Dont you know there is a war on? The early XCOM game has this weird tone, situational as well as gameplay issue. You start off weak, barely any better or the same as a standard military of the time period. Then the game pretends like other militaries don't exist or are unable to mount even the slightest defence. So, where you are and what coverage you can get early is all that matters. This means that (often randomly), the game is determined by how much of the early hostiles appear near you (so you can deal with them) and is a race for you to power up as quickly as possible so you can protect the earth. The game balance revolves around this, making it so that you can get more ahead very quickly because you are 100% of the force being exerted against the aliens. That 100% can be vastly different between a good player and an excellent one, let alone a weaker casual player. You are totally and 100% critical in the early game, so balancing that early game becomes very difficult. I have always thought a good way to solve this problem would be to have the player be more like 10% of the force in the early game. NPC Military, coverage, airforces, etc. So what if we do this instead: 1) NPC's have military bases, airforces, coverage just like you do. 2) There is a lot more alien activity in the early game, but NPC militaries can barely handle it. The scramble interceptors, shoot down hostiles, airstrike, etc. 3) You can place your base to try and protect a country with a weak military, like africa, or place it where activity is high to protect a stronger NPC so they are useful for longer... The early game then consists of a world at war against the aliens and actually holding it's ground. You are there, to shoot down what appears in your general area, steal technology, go on missions, etc as usual. But you are not 100% of the fight, more like 10% of it. Of course, as the game goes on, your technology improves and so does the aliens. But your human allies do not. So in the mid game, they start to lose and some very badly: 1) You can see NPC bases and interceptons getting crushed. 2) Gaps appear in earths defence, relations sour. 3) It becomes clear that you must fill in the gaps, protect your allies, etc. You can afford to make the general alien presence that much more, when there is a lot of NPC defence around to handle it. Taking the pressure off the early game. In the late game: 1) NPC presence is all but gone, now it's all down to you. 2) Difficulty can be much higher 3) You've had time to put coverage in place, but the pressure you are under can also be higher than in a normal XCOM like difficulty curve. In conclusion: The early game matters too much, player skill level cannot effectively be balanced for, due to the snowballing effect that is caused by the player being 100% of the force against the aliens. The tone is also odd, where is everyone else, don't they know there is a war going on? My thought is to try and shift this to the mid game, while also fixing the weird lore and tonal issues. What do you guys think?

Hello everyone - as we're now a few days into June, it's time for our regular update on what we were working on last month! New Assets: We've added a lot of new assets to the game over the past month. The most notable of these are the new 3D models and animations for the alien Sebillian and Cyberdrone units, and while the visual improvement is hopefully clear from the screenshot below, the Cyberdrone in particular also benefits from having proper animation set (e.g. movement / shooting) rather than just being a static lump of floating alien amour. The various ranks of alien are also a bit more distinctive now; again this is most obvious with the two Cyberdrone variants! Work is currently continuing on more of these new alien models. Both the Heavy Mentarch and the Heavy Servitor units are currently just palette swaps of the corresponding basic unit, but we're aiming to have distinct designs and 3d models for both in place before Milestone 6 releases. Further progress was also made in other areas too. We finished another research illustration this month, leaving three remaining (one of which is already in progress). The inventory tile artwork and 3d model for the recently-introduced Alien Bio Rifle is nearly finished. We've added some new sound effects to some of the aliens to help make them more distinctive, and we finished up our level design work on the updated Tropical biome and started adding various new tiles and maps to the new Soviet Town biome. Aircraft Paired Slots: One of the major goals for Milestone 6 is a refresh of the air combat that improves the visuals and polishes the gameplay. The first part of this has been to improve the UI on the Aircraft screen, so we can use our new "paired slot" system to replace the existing "Hardpoints" system (the blue numbers on the aircraft weapons that previously sat alongside the Weight values). This work is now complete. The Hardpoint system reflected the size of different weapons, with each aircraft having up to four hardpoints and missile / torpedo weapons filling one and cannon / lance weapons filling two. Rather than represent this numerically, we can now pair weapon slots together to produce a linked double slot. Putting a cannon / lance into a paired slot will fill both of the linked slots, while missiles and torpedoes only fill a single slot - effectively the same system as before, but much easier to understand. This change is also beneficial from a design standpoint, as it gives another method of differentiating interceptors. For instance, we may decide to give the basic Angel interceptor four weapon slots, with only two of them being paired together - this would limit the plane to only being able to carry a maximum of one cannon / lance. More advanced aircraft could have two sets of paired slots, allowing them to carry dual cannons. These extra options should help with the balancing work we'll be doing as part of the air combat refresh! Bugfixes: Once again, we ended up spending significant amounts of time last month on bugfixes. We released five more stability hotfixes for Milestone 5 last month, fixing a lot of crashes and other gameplay problems - including several annoying bugs we'd been trying to track down for several months, plus a number of older bugs that predated Milestone 5. Our work on Milestone 6 also includes bugfixes, and one of our programmers spent rather a lot of last month doing the painstaking job of tracking down the numerous places in the game where text was not being properly translated and figuring out why. Hopefully we'll be finished with this by the end of next week and non-English users will have a fully localised Milestone 6. Modding: Our technical director spent some time fixing the remaining issues with our mod loading system last month, so it's now possible to create and share "mod packs" that modify the game files. The Mod Loader panel on the Main Menu screen will now read and apply these mods correctly. From a purely technical standpoint, we can now officially say that Xenonauts 2 supports modding. Additionally, we've added support for code injection - basically, mods that can change the code of the game itself (e.g. one user has been experimenting with changing the game code so flight paths on the Geoscape follow the realistic curvature of the Earth). There's now a proper C# framework for doing this, and the process is integrated with the mod packs so that Steam Workshop will be able to distribute these mods once enabled. We'll be creating some documentation and an example project for this system in the next couple of weeks. However, it would still be misleading to claim that Xenonauts 2 is a genuinely moddable game right now - we won't start work on the official mod editor until after Milestone 6 is complete, so modding the game remains painful and difficult due to the format of the JSON files we use to store data. It'll still be a few months until most users can start making mods! Milestone 6: So when will Milestone 6 actually arrive? Sadly, it's still hard to say. Milestone 6 contains a lot of small / medium sized tasks, and the much larger task that is the update to the air combat. We've made good progress through all the smaller tasks, but we've not yet begun work on the core parts of the air combat refresh. We'll have a better idea of how long it'll take to complete once we get started on it, which we're hoping to do in the next two weeks. Of course, that timeline may slip if more hotfixes are needed for Milestone 5. While I think prioritising stability has been the correct decision, it has unfortunately sucked programmer time away from working on the planned new content. Thankfully, the number of bug reports has started to drop off recently - hopefully that's an indication we've dealt with most of the bugs and can switch focus to Milestone 6, but we'll just have to wait and see. I think that's plenty for this update. Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone - we're now into March, so here's our regular update on what we got done during February! Milestone 5 Progress: As always, our focus has been on getting Milestone 5 ready for public release. I said in the last update that we're hoping to do this in March and we're still on track for that, although the exact date depends on how smoothly the bugfixes go over the next few weeks - we're expecting mid-March if all goes smoothly, and late March if we run into issues. In coding terms, a lot of this month was spent ironing out gameplay / stability issues and tidying up some loose ends regarding new features added in Milestone 5, so although our programmers have done a lot of work there's not much in the way of exciting new headline additions for me to talk about here. However, we did find a few days to improve the shooting path calculations in the tactical combat so the permitted fire paths better match what the player would expect, particularly around doorways and corners, as community feedback suggested this area needed more polish (turns out the system had a couple of subtle bugs that needed fixing). Writing & Art: Last month was a big month on the writing front - the writing in the game is now largely complete. This means that all research projects now have research text, the phase briefings have been revised, more tactical missions have introductory character conversations, and there should be a more consistent narrative thread running throughout the whole game. Hopefully it's now much clearer why all the factions in the game are acting the way they are. Finishing this allowed us to send all the new game text off for translation, and we should have localised text in Milestone 5 in the next week or two (which was one of the main barriers to the public release). We've added some new illustrations to the game over the past month, most of which are just adding flavour art to the new UI popups related to the new Geoscape mechanics in Milestone 5. In our recent 5.13 Experimental update we also added unique illustrations for three of the five strategic operations (which should make it easier to tell them apart) and we're expecting to have the remaining two done shortly. Community Suggestion Review: Once Milestone 5 is done we'll be starting work on Milestone 6, which should be our final major update before then 1.0 launch. Alongside the last remaining features on our roadmap (Air Combat Revamp, Ending Cinematic, Soviet Town Biome, Mod Tools) we've been reading through the many, many community suggestions that have been posted on Steam, our Discord and our forums during the Early Access period. We're now reviewing all these suggestions as a team and looking at which ones we can include in Milestone 6. Although we can't add every suggestion to the game, there's a lot of good ideas here and we want to thank everyone who has given us feedback and suggestions during development - we may not always have responded immediately, but we did read them all eventually! That's everything for this update - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have a big announcement in the next few weeks about the public release of Milestone 5!

Hello everyone - as we're now into the early days of November, it's time for an update on what we were working on during October. The short answer is this: we made good progress in several areas last month, but frustratingly slow progress in one key area that delayed the Milestone 5 prototype. Milestone 5 / Strategic Improvements: Our main focus is still on getting our Milestone 5 prototype into a state where we can release it for public testing. We were hoping that would happen last month, but we weren't able to make enough progress on the new strategy mechanics. There were a few reasons for this, but the main one was that we continued to find new bugs that needed fixing after the Unity editor update I discussed in our previous update. Thankfully, in the second half of the month we were able to better focus on implementing our new Supporter system. This system places four VIPs in each funding region who can be recruited as Supporters by the Xenonauts to provide your organisation a variety of strategic bonuses (more funding, faster research / engineering, etc) or turned into panic-generating Infiltrators by the aliens. If you can recruit all of the Supporters in each region, you also unlock a special regional bonus. The Supporter system itself is now mostly functional, but we're still unsure how long it'll take us to connect it to the other game systems. For instance, the new Doomsday Counter system that is now active in the early stages of the game also ties into the Supporter system (with alien Infiltrators generating enemy Doomsday progress, and Xenonaut Supporters slowing it). We will also need to update the Infiltration UFO missions to turn neutral VIPs into Infiltrators if successful (where previously they simply generated Panic like other types of UFO mission), etc. Given what happened last month I'm not going to make any promises about when the Milestone 5 prototype will be out - I'll just say we're working hard to get it into the hands of testers as quickly as possible (we should be able to release the first testing builds as soon as these strategic updates are complete). New Missions: Milestone 5 adds various new missions - crash sites for the Battleship UFO, the two-part final mission (Operation ENDGAME), and two unique new plot missions that take place on an alien orbital station (which appear around the point Cruiser UFOs start appearing). The Battleship assets and crash site maps were completed some time ago, and this month we finished the final art assets and map setup for both halves of the Operation ENDGAME mission. The first mission on the alien orbital station is also at quite an advanced stage, with the custom art assets for that map now complete, but there's still further work to be done on the second orbital station mission. Thankfully, this shouldn't cause delays - most of the remaining work is custom art assets, and we don't need the visuals to be final for the Milestone 5 prototype builds. Alien Updates: Last month we added a new type of alien to the game, the Biter. These small insectoid aliens are more of a living weapon than a proper new species, as certain alien units can fire them towards enemy units - at which point they will charge towards nearby hostiles and try to bite them to death. Biters will expire within a few turns of spawning and have very low HP, but a pack of them can still pose a threat - particularly against units equipped with weapons that cost a lot of TU to fire (e.g. sniper rifles). We also continued to make changes to our existing aliens to better differentiate them from one another. The main cannon on a Cyberdrone no longer acts like a giant plasma rifle, but is instead now a blast weapon that can inflict major damage across a large area (although it is now less likely to instantly kill a heavily-armoured soldier). We'll be finishing up some changes to the Mantid and Sebillian weapons this month too, which I'll explain next month. Illustrated UI Backgrounds: One of the coolest features in Xenonauts 1 was that the illustrated backgrounds of the strategic UI screens would upgrade as you progressed through the campaign, showing the way the new technological developments you had unlocked were changing your organisation - by the end of the game, the all characters had futuristic uniforms and the rooms were full of sci-fi equipment. Lots of players thought this really helped immerse them in the game. Although implementing this in Xenonauts 2 involves repainting our existing (perfectly fine) UI background art, we've decided the feature is cool enough that we've found some extra budget for it. Handily, all the programming for this feature has already been finished, so as soon as the new artwork is done we can just slot it straight into the game. We started the sketch work for the new Research screen background last week, and hopefully you'll be able to see some results either in the Milestone 5 prototype or next month's development update! I'll leave the update there for this month - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have some good news on Milestone 5 in the coming few weeks!

Hello everyone - hope you all had a nice June. As we're now into the start of July, it's well past time for our monthly development update. Milestone 4 Released: We released our Milestone 4 update onto the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches last week, which was a rather substantial update to the game. Most of our efforts this month simply went into patching and tweaking Milestone 4, so this is going to be a much shorter update than normal. Anyway, we want to give a big shout out to everyone who helped us out by testing the experimental versions and reporting bugs or giving feedback, as your assistance really helps improve the quality of our updates! We've continued patch Milestone 4 post-release to fix the handful of bugs that made it past our testing, and also to add a few bits of missing content (such as the text for handful of research projects that didn't quite meet the original deadline). We'll continue this as long as necessary to fix any remaining stability issues, but in general the game seems to be stable for most players. This means we're now ready to turn our attention to our next big update. Milestone 5: Milestone 5 is going to be our most important update so far - the goal is to allow the player to unlock and complete the final mission, meaning you will be finally able to play the entire game from start to finish. However, this won't be the last update for the game before we launch out of Early Access, as we'll still be releasing at least one additional Milestone update afterwards to further polish and improve the game. Unfortunately, Milestone 5 is likely to have quite a long development cycle - it's likely to be an even larger update than Milestone 4 was, and will likely include most of the remaining gameplay-related items on our roadmap and revamping the second half of the story. That means there's going to be quite a lot of content for a small team to generate! Rather than try to talk in detail about plans that haven't yet been finalised, I think the most sensible thing is just to finish this update here. Next month's update should be a lot more exciting, as we should have some solid progress towards Milestone 5 that we can show off!

Took the time to start a new playthrough with 3.40 just to feel how the difficulty and balance feels after latest changes. Here's my random thoughts. I played with veteran difficulty with increased starting funds. Start of the game and plot might not make much sense for the players that have disabled or skipped the tutorial. Maybe add a text box or dialog scene at the beginning of the game that summarises events that are otherwise told in the tutorial. Most game tutorials don't have any story content, so people might really miss out here. I had a Cleaner VIP mission very early in the game (first or second cleaner mission, right after the first abduction) and it felt really difficult. I tried to push forward as fast as I could while looting one side building for extra intel and I had no business trying to capture the VIP. There's just too many cleaners and the time limit is too tight. It's way more difficult than any other cleaner missions while they should be about the same IMO. Reduce enemies and add one or two more turns. Also, might be a good idea to force the mission to spawn later and/or be one time persistent mission. It has no business being that tough so early in the game. New jungle (escort) maps are way too clutterd and dense. Makes them difficult and annoying to play. Soldier progression feels spot on now. Cleaner mission repetition annoys me still. Had a second (too tough) VIP mission before even one intel gather. I'd gladly have it the other way around: 2 intel gathers and then a VIP mission. Would make more sense difficulty curve, progression and story wise too. Resources were quite well balanced but even with the increased starting funds I had, I felt the money was a bit tight. Alenium/alloy seemed fine. I hate to build basic air weapons. Why is the logic different than with troop weapons? Air game felt too punishing after day 100. I only had three angels with laser lancers and needed to transfer them around the globe to try to keep panic down. It didn't end well. I would have needed at least 2 more airplanes at that time but had no means funding them and their weapons. Also, as I need to complete a destroyer crash site before I can research Ufo Hull plating and only then I can research Phantom and after that, I still need to build and arm them. This all takes like a month or more and by that time, destroyer waves have raised the panic to 90-100 at least in some regions. AI still leaves a lot to be desired: They waste a lot of TU's moving back and forth for no reason, don't stay put when in optimal positions, don't take multiple shots when close to a clear target, but move into shroud instead and take a quick snapshot from there etc. AI doesn't seem to be aware of where each side's frontlines are, so they often move into unoptimal locations behind my lines. My third abduction at day 87 was brutal. Wraiths and servitors in dock biome and I just had to save scum my way through it. Waaaay too difficult. Huge difficulty spike. After the Cleaner HQ is destroyed, the game starts to repeat itself and becomes somewhat boring. The plot to reveal Cleaner HQ has so cool progression that when it's finally resolved, I feel the game starts to become stale. It might be a good idea to introduce some similar large scale objective for the player to strive towards a month or so after the Cleaner HQ so advancing the plot wouldn't feel so linear and predictable where you just shoot bigger and bigger ufos down. Mid/late game needs cleaner style mission variety too. Make alien base similar mission objective as cleaner HQ with multi-tiered proggression maybe? Civilian turns take too long. Do they all need to move so much and every turn? Do we need to have a civilian turn at the end of the mission when all the enemies are dead and we could just call it a day? End of mission screen should also show changes in panic and the amount of broken/lost gear Shotgun civilians are still super aggressive and raid ufos completely fearlessly. Abduction missions start to annoy me - too much repetition. Maybe after completing a few, unlock an abductor alien base mission where you need to rescue already abducted people or something instead. Other that that, the game felt good. Somewhat buggy, but still great fun.

August has been a busy month for us here at Goldhawk. Although it's not been quite as crazy as the two weeks immediately after our Early Access launch, the last four weeks have been very intense in a different way. Expanding the Team: This is mostly because the development team has expanded significantly over the last couple of weeks. When we launched into Early Access the team here at Goldhawk was only three full-time employees (one designer and two programmers) and there's just not enough hours in the day for a team that small to run a project of this size effectively, even if you're all working evenings and weekends. In practice this has resulted in a situation where we've collected a lot of useful gameplay improvements / suggestions and bug reports from our community, but we've only been able to tackle the most urgent of those issues. This is frustrating for both the team and for the players, as the other tasks are still important things we want to fix - they're just not as important as the stuff we actually have been fixing. As the only way to make a serious dent in the task lists was to get more manpower, this month we hired one additional full-time programmer (who is actually an old friend that worked with us on the original Xenonauts) and two more highly-experienced part-time programmers. Many thanks to anyone that applied for a position on the team after reading our last update - we really appreciated seeing so many enthusiastic people reaching out to us! Furthermore, we've also hired an additional full-time level designer / QA assistant, and two part-time designers who will be helping with the level design and game design / balancing respectively. Our goal is to respond to all community bug reports within one working day, to start delivering new maps with each major update, and generally to be able to respond better to player feedback and suggestions. I've been spread WAY too thin over the past few months. Improving the Game: We've continued to improve the game over the past four weeks, adding community-requested features like the option to modify the length of mission timers and the ability to break apart / merge together airborne squadrons, plus successful fixes for the memory leaks in the game and all sorts of other gameplay bugfixes. However, work on the game has been slower than normal due to all the recruitment we've been doing - if you're a small team, it takes a lot of time to be reading through CVs and code samples / portfolios to evaluate applicants, it takes time to interview candidates, and it takes time to get employment contracts signed. And most of all, it takes time to get people set up on the project and get them up to speed on our huge codebase or to teach them how to use a complex tool like our level editor. Time spent on this will quickly pay off, but it does slow things down in the short term. This has affected Milestone 2 most badly. We're now hoping to release this onto the Experimental branches at the end of next week or the beginning of the week after. I'll also mention the loading times briefly here, as I know they are important to many people. We took a look at them earlier this month but it quickly became clear any serious attempts to speed these up would change the structure of the saves and therefore break save game compatibility. As a result, we've pushed this work back to Milestone 2 (as each new Milestone build is likely to break save games anyway, due to the significant balance changes). Community Mod Tools: One thing we did spend a bit of time on this month is the mod loader and Steam Workshop integration, which is now nearly complete. However, we've not yet started work on the official mod creation tools and it may be a few months until we do given our focus is currently on upgrading the core game. If anyone is potentially interested in helping design a GUI that hooks into our code so modders can more easily edit the game files, please take a look at this thread! Conclusion: That's it for this month's announcement. We've made decent progress but most of our time this month has been spent expanding the team so we can make faster progress in future. Thanks for reading, everyone!

Hello everyone - it's been a busy month here at Goldhawk, and there's a lot to talk about in this update! Marketing & Communication: One of the main things we've been working on is how we can keep you guys better informed about our progress. I'm therefore pleased to announce a new face is joining the team to help us out on this front - Paul, who you will see posting under the name "nervous_testpilot". I've known Paul for a long time now, as he was originally one half of Mode 7 Games (who made tactical games such as the Frozen Synapse series and Frozen Endzone) who I leaned on for a lot of useful advice back when I was developing the original Xenonauts. Since then Paul has moved into the publishing world and has published various smaller games under the Mode 7 brand, such as Tokyo-42 or The Colonists. He's therefore the perfect person to help out by handling our marketing, sales and communications work so I can focus on getting the game finished. What does this mean for you? I've written some updated posts that outline what mechanics are currently in the game and what is planned before release (similar to the threads we had up during the Kickstarter) which will be unhidden early next week. We're also aiming to have project updates every two weeks focusing either on the development progress that has been made or diving down to analyse a specific new mechanic in more detail. The Steam page and our website is going to be updated with fresh media, and we'll start monitoring the Steam forums and posting our updates there. You should start to see a bit more coverage about Xenonauts 2 in the news media once we announce our Early Access date, and in general we'll be taking a more active approach towards telling people about the game. If anyone is particularly keen on Discord, we're setting up a Discord for the game where the updates will also be posted (although the forums will remain the primary community hub). If anyone wants to join that, the link is here: https://discord.gg/fG4Xr6q Gameplay Improvements: What have we been working on over the past month in game development terms? Lots and lots of things. Let's start by talking about artwork, because we're making progress on several fronts there. One of the things I feel is important is to replace some of the placeholder art that people encounter early in the game. We've got new background painted art on the Research and Engineering screen (as well as updated character art), and we've also had some additional art painted up for a couple of the early research projects. One specific painting that represents the Orbital Bombardment mechanic (i.e. a space station vaporising a city from orbit) turned out pretty well, I think! We're also working on the designs for the new UFO. We've reverted to the X1 style of UFOs, but we're not planning to just re-use the old designs. The Probe UFO shown above is just a revised version of the old Light Scout from the original game, but most of the designs diverge more heavily than that. Again, I think new artwork goes a long way to making the game feel fresh and interesting even if the fundamentals remain familiar. Finally, I've spent the last couple of weeks talking to some external artists about improving the visual appearance of the ground missions in X2. Although these experiments are still at an early stage, it does seem like we can make some substantial improvements to the visuals by changing our texturing style (the ground textures in particular could be improved a lot). We'll have to see how things progress, but some of the test scenes are looking really nice - with a nice X1-inspired handpainted feel, but with a more "high-res" 3D feel. Let's hope we can translate that into the game in the next few months! On the coding side of things, we've spent quite a bit of time getting the new UFO hull-hiding system set up in the ground combat. This is the system from X1 that makes the walls of the UFO disappear when you see the interior of the UFO, giving the "cutaway" feel. This is a complex system at the best of times, but we're also trying to incorporate destructibility into these UFOs in a similar way to the X1 Fire in the Hole! mod (essentially there are specific breach points on the hull of each UFO that can be blasted open). This work still isn't finished, but things are going well so far and we're hoping we'll be able to start work on the final UFO models in the next week or two. We've also been working on a number of smaller systems. We've set up the systems for night detection on the Geoscape, so the game will load a night mission if the Geoscape night shadow is over the mission site (all the night missions mechanics are still subject to testing). We've done a bunch of work on the soldier equip and dropship equip screens to improve the usability there. The anomalies / events spawned by UFOs as they fly around the map now contain the full variation of text that we have in X1, but now also have biome-dependent tags so we can disable events like forest fires or shopping malls being strafed from happening in the middle of a polar region, etc. I personally have spent most of my non-management time working on the threads about our plans for the game and the research text for the plot research, which so far is 12 research reports / plot-related pop-ups. There's probably another 5 or 6 optional research projects that I need to write that will unlock an alternate ending (for people who like reading research text). These form the foundations of who the aliens are and their capabilities and intentions, which then feeds into all the other research text. I'm aiming to get the early game research text done in the near future so the first 10-15 researches are all properly written up - again, I think it's important that the initial content is in place even if the entire research tree isn't written. Builds: The build I promised in the last update hasn't yet materialised, largely because the ground combat maps are in serious flux at the moment. There are several big changes happening to the levels are the moment which means I'm not that keen to spend time on our existing maps, as there's a good chance I'll have to throw my work away shortly: The biggest one is updating the designs and sizes of all the UFOs once the "hull hiding" system is in place. It's likely that the UFOs end up being significantly bigger, which will affect all the maps and require a redesign. I need to run through all the maps and re-export them to set them up properly to support night missions (as each map now has settings that define whether it can support a day mission or a night mission). Until I do this, no night missions will work. The visuals are potentially subject to some serious upgrades, which will probably also mean the level design will change. Finally, we need to set the maps up to support multiple possible UFOs and dropships that are spawned in at the start of the mission depending on what happened on the Geoscape. At the moment the dropships and UFOs are baked into the maps (a legacy from the days when we only planned one dropship) so if we want to support another dropship we need to make a copy of every single map where we swap the Chinook out for the new dropship, which is way too much work to be worthwhile (this is why the advanced dropships are currently disabled in the tech tree). Hmm, having written all that out, I realise now it probably makes more sense to release the next build as soon as possible using the old maps while they still work - because it's going to take us a while to work through all that code and make all the new maps! Maybe we will try to put out a new build in the next week or so then. I'll have a look into how feasible that is this afternoon, although it'll still feature the old UFOs in ground missions and the night missions won't function, etc. Anyway, that's more than long enough - there's lots going on here even if I'm not paying much attention to the forums right now!

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.

With October over, it's once again time for our monthly update. The big news this month has been the release of Closed Beta V22, which is a fairly significant upgrade on previous builds. This is currently only on our Experimental branch but I think it'll be making its way to the main / default Steam and GOG branches in a week or two when it has had a bit more testing. We've done three hotfixes for this build since it was first released and there is a fourth due out shortly that should iron out the most serious remaining bugs we're aware of. Our priority for V22 has been to improve opening hour or two of the game, which we've done in several ways. The first is to establish the game setting more clearly right from the start of the game, which we've done by adding a short text intro that is played when you start a new campaign. Some of you may remember that we've set Xenonauts 2 a little before the alien invasion properly begins, with the player first having to deal with the Cleaners and transition from being an intelligence agency into being a military organisation, and this is the clearest way we could think of to explain this to the player. Of course, we've also put some further lore and explanation in the first Research project popup that the player gets (which I rewrote for V22). The second thing we've done is to continue to improve the visuals. The new UI visuals for the loading screen and strategy topbar have been added to the game, and all the Xenonauts are now using their final 3D models in the tactical combat. Another cool little detail is that we've added a lot more hairstyles to the 3D models, so now a soldier in the ground combat will change hairstyle and colour to (roughly) match the hair shown in their soldier portrait - something that took a surprisingly long time to implement, but makes your starting squad much more distinctive from one another. The visual updates to the tactical mission environments continue too, with the Polar biome getting some attention this month. I'm pretty pleased with how it's looking now - it's very clean and readable, but I think it also looks pleasant in an unobtrusive way. We'll be moving onto the fourth Biome (likely the Dock) next month. Thirdly, we've added another dozen maps to the game. There's a lot of Raid missions in the early part of the game, but there was previously only one Raid map per biome. There's now three Raid maps per biome which means there's way more variety in the early missions, something that will improve further once I set up the new mission types in the early game in the next major build. Finally, I also did some more writing / rewriting. I worked on about 10 of the early game research projects and either wrote them from scratch or rewrote them from what we already had. Anyway, all that content generation has been quite time consuming to do so I think that represents good progress for this month. I'm taking a couple of weeks off in November (it's a long time since I've had a break) but I'm still expecting a decent amount of progress to be made and hopefully we can get V23 out before we break for Christmas!

So, first thing to say - our Kickstarter will not be launching today (4th May), and is going to be pushed back a couple of weeks so we can finish up the video and the Kickstarter page. Things are progressing well but there's a few key assets that we want finished before the launch, as it'll make everything look a lot more professional - and I will of course keep the forums updated when we settle on a specific launch date. However, if you're interested in hearing about the Kickstarter then please make sure you're signed up for our mailing list. We very rarely use this list, but we'll be sending out a notification about the Kickstarter several days before via the mailing list and then sending another notification when we press the button and set the Kickstarter live! We're going to have an internal team meeting next week to discuss the draft page text / reward tiers, then later that week we'll be revealing more information to the community and asking for your feedback. A couple of major points of interest from the the last month: We've released what is possibly the final version of the free public combat builds (V0.23.0) on GOG Galaxy. We've fixed up a lot of the gameplay and stability issues and assuming nobody encounters any major issues, we'll be using this build for the free Kickstarter demo. It'd be great if people could test this because it would be nice to find any bugs before it goes out to the whole world! We've released a load of information on our planned changes and improvements in Xenonauts-2. These choices may continue to change and evolve during development, but those threads are fairly good guide to how the game will look in the closed beta - and then we'll think about further changes or expansion based on the community feedback from that. Onto general development news - things have continued to progress well, as we're predominantly working on adding content to the game these days. Although it breaks frequently because it's so complicated, the work on the merging of the strategy layer and the ground combat is largely done. Missions are loading the correct maps in the correct biomes with the correct combatants and equipment, and the correct items are being recovered and experience and health of your soldiers is now being tracked back to the strategy layer. What we're doing now is starting to add the various types of alien to the game and giving them their various different weapons and special abilities. Some of this has been rather straightforward, but other equipment / alien abilities requires new code to support the way it interacts with the game mechanics so is going to take longer - we'll probably be working on this in the background for another couple of months. We're also working on making the maps load the crashed / landed variants of UFOs correctly, which is kinda complex because the UFOs now have to support destructibility, but I think we'll have that working in its basic form soon enough. The strategy game also has all of the major mechanics in place now too - the base, the interceptors, the research / engineering projects, the soldier equip screen, etc. What we're concentrating on now is making small changes to existing mechanics to make the game play better - e.g. tweaking the Agent Actions, enhancing the new interception system, etc. The gameplay experience is steadily improving as time passes but it's certainly not ready for public consumption yet! There's a lot of places where the game is still lacking, but the biggest two issues with the gameplay are challenge and content. The combat AI is incredibly basic and doesn't present any real challenge to the player, which makes it somewhat difficult to balance the gameplay. The other issue is the lack of maps and differentiation between the aliens; it's possible to play a single mission and have some fun but we can't support a proper campaign until we have a good variety of maps and all the different variants of alien to fight against. These are two of the big areas that we'll be focusing on in preparation for the post-Kickstarter closed beta. We'll post more details up about the closed beta once our Kickstarter preparations are out of the way. There's lots for me to do so I'm going to get back to work now, but thanks for reading and I hope we'll be seeing you again when the Kickstarter launches!

X - Division New Dawn V 1.00.10 for 0.35.0+ XCE We are in the sky ... We are on the ground ... We are a paramilitary organisation ... We have the best of the best - with some personal issues here and there. Real characters as you say nowadays ... We do everything, from stealing to protecting transports, smuggleing weapons for those who can pay for it. We destroy organisations if the price is right and provide safe routes from A to B, even through hell if it has to be ... Sometimes we also do some good guy stuff, but dont ask for it, except you can put enough money on the table ... Our people are unhonorable discharged veterans or geniuses who dont feel quite valued in their former organisation. Some average guys as well who are attracted to the way we do things ... but honestly they have to be a bit crazy to be hanging around those guys ... say us ... ... everybodys a bit crazy here ... We have been hired by some wealthy individuals who think we can save the earth and believe in our methods. This group has put their faith in us ... and most importantly, their money. I guess it is time to do some good guy stuff again ! Whats my spleen ? World Domination ! Everybody ought to have a goal, no ? But if these aliens do as they please there will be nothing left to rule over. What is yours, commander ? Welcome to X-Division ! The Team Drages - Lead Modder and Art Manager Charon - Code Manager Draku - Debugger and Tester Sfarrelly - Writer AI Advisor and XCE Support - Kabill, Solver, Ilunak Dedicated Testers - Phoenix1x+52, Marandor1 Support - Max_Cain, Kabill Special Thanks - Nuclearstudent, odizzido, Xany, Squaddie Perseus, Woz2, asierus24, Blackwolf, Reactorcore, Alienkiller, CherryCoke, XCOMJunkie, Brandon, Maera, Trueman11 Special Thanks to Content Contributors: Max_Caine, the XNT team, Axiomatic, Pandi, Svinedrengen, Z01, We are thanking Chris for a wonderfully modable game and all the experience we could make because of this What people say about X-Division "Before all of this, the aliens were fighting seriously with jokes, then we gave them actual weapons and now they are fighting seriously, jokeing about you" - Drages "Your blinking dots on the hull look so awesome that its the first time i actually looked at the UFO in over 600 hours of gameplay time" -Charon Table of Content 1. Game Overview 1.1 Game Details 2. Questions & Answers 3. Installation 3.1 Latest Patch 3.2 Troubleshooting 3.3 Linux Installation Advice 3.4 Explanation for the installation technology used 3.5 Licenses and Copyright Notices 3.4 Explanation for the installation technology used 4.Known Bugs 5. Some things before you start 6.Credits 1. Game Overview X-Division is a complete overhauled game experience, featuring an vast amount of different enemies to capture, a new and improved, aggressive AI, 288 new weapons including katanas, 9 vehicles and 3 mechs and 13 sets of armour. New revised Aircraft game , crafted by me which builds and extends on the existing aircraft mechanic and polishes it to the extreme. New mechanic, hit and run tactics, new alien weapons and more .. so totally not what drages planned :). 22 new aircrafts from which 5 are alien interceptor to recruit and 48 aircraft weapons. Enemies feauture different armor resistances, different strenght points and weaknesses. Every alien race is good and bad in and against something and you better find that out quickly before its too late, commander. Terror and base attack missions will happen frequently and will be of importance all the way to and in the end game. Captureing aliens is immensly important in this mod as it will open up all the vital and better tech for you. Unique specialists you can only capture at terror sites, crash sites or base attacks. Special UFOs with a special goals which carry special units into battle. Special Officier Units for every phase of the game to capture to give you that special research boost you need. Aliens will adapt to your style of playing with different strategies of aggressive overwhelming force. " Every phase will have their own weapon branches. Ths branches will be mostly energy or ballistic based. Addidition to this your arsenal will make updated versions we call as MK in the mod. You will get the MK 1 versions as prototype and easy. For MK-2 versions, you will need to capture alien specialist and for MK-3 ultimate versions you will need to get specific things. Vehicle Weapons, Grenades and Explosives will have updated versions too. Special UFOs with a special goals which carry special units into battle ! UFOs with their own puposes and missions. You will see huge ufos for terror and base attacks, nearly impossible to stop at the air. You will see shuttles and special cargo ships along others. You will see any kind of ufo nearly at every phase with their upgraded stats, weapons and crew. Near endgame, you will see the real force of the Alien menace with the all mighty dreadnought and motherships." - Drages An detailed manufacture and disassembling system for alien weapons, grenades, UFOs. A chance based, incredible intrigues, complex research tree featuring around 900 xpedia entries and lively maps with civilians and local forces appropriatelly equippted. All of this over 4 balanced Phases over the game presenting a long and hard journey to menkinds destruction or, temporary, survival. It is in your hands, commander. 1.1 Game Details Weapons and Ground Combat Aircraft and Aircraft Gameplay Manufacture, Research, Xenopedia Maps, Graphics and UI, Miscancellous Picture Gallery 2. Questions & Answers 3. Installation 0. The base vanilla version has to be 1.65+ . 1. To avoid complications unsubscribe to all other mods on steam, and delete your your whole mods/.. folder. Then make a fresh install of xenonauts. X-Division 1.00.00 is not compatible with earlier versions. 2. Install the latest XCE version. For windows steam users right click on Xenonauts in your library > Porperties > Betas > community - Xenonauts: Community Edition branch For GOG/linux steam users follow the latest installation instructions here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/forum/23-xce-release-announcements/ Linux steam users will need to run X:CE through WINE or a similar program. 3. If you downloaded the steam workshop support mod install it now. This is to show some support but has no other purpose than that. 3.5 Start up the game at least once and exit it properly. 4. Download all 3 parts of X-Division 1.00.00: Download ( Part 1 MD5: d46af869d5435a9c425d51acd1442897, Part 2 MD5: c57b4fb563ca419c9e455f0908701fe9 , Part 3 MD5: c8ca596b39d920e45a9a45fc71611892 ) 5. Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program, it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Have all 3 files together and open part 1 ( = unrar the multi rar archive ). Double click the .exe file. Follow the instructions of the installer. Winrar or Peazip have been confirmed to work. 6. The advanced installation has some options to choose from, namely: There are some optional mods you can activate/deactivate. Lets go through them one by one: 1. X-Division Easy Airgame/X-Division No Airgame There are 3 ways to play the airgame, 1. Manual 2. Autoresolve 3. No Airgame . No Airgame removes the necessity to play the airgame and replaces it with a 1 click solution. With No Airgame you only have to build the latest fighters and bombers and hit autoresolve. If you quickly want to jump into the Ground Combat this is the option of your choice :). Note that this tilts the balance in the favour of the player and is not representativ of the economic balance of the game. Recommended state: ON if you want to skip the airgame. 2. COM - Ambient Sounds/COM - Ambience Forest This mods add ambient sound and add the least amount of instability to the game - it still makes the game more unstable. Recommended State: OFF if you dont want to risk a higher instability for beautiful sounds. XCE 0.34.3 should fix the instability. 3. COM - [V1.08] Jsleezy's Real Fighter Portrait Pack Adds alternative soldier faces to the game. Deactivate Khall´s more Portraits if you are using this to avoid art inconsistencies Recommended State: OFF if you dont want to play with more realistic faces. XCE 0.34.3 should fix the instability. Checklist in case you want to change something later on: You only have X-Division Workshop Support if you subscribed and installed it from the steam workshop The modloader needs to be EXACTLY in the priority order the installer sets it. The modloader needs exactly this active mods. The mods you can still change after the installation are No Airgame, Khalls and Jeezlies different portraits ( only one active at a time ), both Ambient sound mods ( either active for ambient sounds or deactivated for more stability ) and the No Click sound ( removes mouse click ). You shouldn`t play X-Division with any other mods than stated. Only cosmetic mods are allowed and only if you know exactly what you are doing. Keep in mind every savegame is unique to its mods its saved with. 7. Apply the latest available patch - 3.1 Latest Patch section ^^. Every patch contains all prior changes as well. 8. Installation video by Mulligan/LeEdgyMemeKing if you need more help https://youtu.be/Jwwn9bU6y10 - Mulligan https://youtu.be/l439koiq0_8 - LeEdgyMemeKing 3.1 Latest Patch ( theres a patch history in the third post - with downloads ) Notes: X-Divison has gone the step to replace vanilla files. There has been an original file added for every replaced one in case you want to deinstall the mod. In case of doubt make a reinstall of the game or verify game integrity through steam. Before applying patches withdraw all scientists and engineers from their current projects. You can reapply them afterwards. You only need to download and install the latest Patch avaialble, it contains all prior fixes as well. The .00 to .01 patch is savegame compatible As a basic rule, never patch during Ground Combat Installation: The Base for this patch has to be version 1.00.00 or higher. This update is not available for versions lower than 1.00.00 . Download the X-Division 1.00.01 Update: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/files/file/31-x-division-latest-patch-09945/ ( MD5: 489d03269506927ae5981dbb0de816be ) Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program(s), it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Start the executable provided in the file. Follow the instruction of the installer After you have used the installer there is no need to change ANYTHING anymore, everything has been taken care of, including scripts, modloader priority, and everything else you may think of. The only time you might want to change something is if you are activating/deactivating No Airgame or change the soldier models. Enjoy . For reference, this is how the modloader can look like after the installation, plus/minus optional mods on/off. DAY X Unofficial WiP Version 1.00.11c "New Dawn" Notes: X-Divison has gone the step to replace vanilla files. There has been an original file added for every replaced one in case you want to deinstall the mod. In case of doubt make a reinstall of the game or verify game integrity through steam. You only need to download and install the latest Patch avaialble, it contains all prior fixes as well. The .10 to .11c patch is NOT savegame compatible. If you want to make it savegame compatible you need to make a backup of your researches.xml, run the installer, and immediately copy your backup over the new file again. You will miss out on the fixed researches but you can continue the campaign. As a basic rule, never patch during Ground Combat Installation: The Base for this patch has to be version 1.00.00 or higher. This update is not available for versions lower than 1.00.00 . Download the X-Division 1.00.11c Update: https://mega.nz/file/lYwRBaZJ#Nu7Vt08i0LHEV2FqOTX9uCM9sVSHXoEl_Bee_3M_XqM ( MD5: e852cdedc43f0c7b6aaa4f4c60300601 ) Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program(s), it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Start the executable provided in the file. Follow the instruction of the installer After you have used the installer there is no need to change ANYTHING anymore, everything has been taken care of, including scripts, modloader priority, and everything else you may think of. The only time you might want to change something is if you are activating/deactivating No Airgame or change the soldier models. Enjoy . Changelog: DAY 978 Unofficial Version 1.00.10 "New Dawn" The .01 to .10 patch is NOT savegame compatible. Installation: The Base for this patch has to be version 1.00.00 or higher. This update is not available for versions lower than 1.00.00 . Download the X-Division 1.00.10 Update: https://mega.nz/#!dQQwCQRC!gzlksCzX9l91PAJfViyyAyXzd_VN0weUL1X5GZmeuvU Link ( MD5: f82bbe1f12c7e97a7b86c7ec3de19e11 ) Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program(s), it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Start the executable provided in the file. Follow the instruction of the installer After you have used the installer there is no need to change ANYTHING anymore, everything has been taken care of, including scripts, modloader priority, and everything else you may think of. The only time you might want to change something is if you are activating/deactivating No Airgame or change the soldier models. Enjoy . Changelog: You did it. Welcome onboard, Commander ! 3.2 Troubleshooting This mod is %98 stable. If you got any weird problems like aliens without guns, strange visual errors, game crashes, they should be about wrong install or mod loader issues. Be sure that you got X:CE, X-Division and X-Division Patch is installed and then come to our topic with your save game and we will help you. Sincerely yours, Drages I think i got a bug, can you help me ? If you want some help, make a bug report or think that something is not the way it is supposed to be, add a full screenshots of your whole modloader and your savegame ( geoscpae only ). I cant get the 3 multirar files to work, any help ? The first step to troubleshoot this on your own is to make sure your files are the correct ones. Generate your md5 sums of all 3 files and compare them to the official ones provided with every download. If they are the same, you got the correct data files. After that its just making sure all 3 files are in the same spot and open the first one with either WinRar or Peazip. Why does the first start take so long to load ? Thats normal. X-Division is quite a big mod so loading all of its ressources takes time. Help ! I cant click on anything in the geoscape ! Hotkey are working though. Make sure that everything is the way it should be and then: Simply start up the game, go straight to new game, start a new game, load your current save, save it, exit and restart the game. This should now be fixed. The top part of this Cruiser does not get transparent. What do i do ? You change your view option by pressing the button right beside your inventory one. Cycle through until you find one that works lets you see inside the UFO. 3.3 Linux Installation Advice We know that linux users love to tinker endlessly in order to get their software working, and we dont want to take that joy (and countless hours ) away from you. But if you are struggling and want to get some advice into the right direction, here it is. You will have to start XCE through a windows compatability layer, WINE or Proton for instance The installer might not work for you, because it expects Windows variables you dont have. The assets.7z contains all the X-Division data you need, and you can copy and overwrite your vanilla assets folder with it. You will need to manually rearrange the mod loading order. Section 3.1 should have some pictures how that should look like. Find the linux equivalent of %APPDATA%/Goldhawk Interactive/Xenonauts/internal/scripts and delete the scripts folder once after step 3.5. You propably know better what i am talking about than i do, because i dont keep track of 10 different distros and how they handle stuff. People have reported that that should lead to a working version, mostly depending on how well the windows compatability layer handles the sys calls. You can now celebrate that you have a working game on linux :). 3.4 Explanation for the installation technology used The 3 rar parts of the installation are called a Multivolume RAR Archive. We shall further refer to this as MRAR archive, or simply MRAR. https://www.win-rar.com/split-files-archive.html?&L=0 Each MRAR archive is sensitive, or can be sensitive, to the process it got created from. While the endproduct should be the same we found that unpacking the MRAR with the same tool it got created from yields the best result. In this case the tool used to create it was peazip. Therefore in case of doubt, use peazip. WinRAR has been confirmed to work as well. Each part of an MRAR contains an "archive is finished" or "archive is not finished" flag at the end of its volume. If an unpacking tool finds such flag, it looks for the next part. The information of where the next part is, is not saved inside the current volume, because the next part could literally be on another pc, in another country, on a different continent. The unpacking tool searches its paths for the same named entity with ".partX" before the .rar specifier, where X is the current part + 1. Shall it find such entity it will repeat the same process until it finds an archive with the "archive is finished" flag. If it doesnt find the next volume it will throw an error, or worse, throw no error and assume its a standalone rar while opening a half backed archive. You start the whole process from the first archive, that is .part1.rar, and the unpacking tool will find the rest, if it can. At the time of writing this (2.6.24) the first part has a size of 2,5gb. If you want to check whether or not your unpacking tool openend the archive correctly you can look at the total size of the archive, which should be displayed somewhere in the GUI of your tool. The total size of the archive is ~7gb. If it says so, it found all volumes of its MRAR. All patches are distributed as standalone RARs. All data pertaining X-Division is contained in assets.7z. It is therefore entirely possible to install X-Division without the use of the installer, as well as rehosting X-Division without including the installer. The installer only automates steps the user could take themself. 3.5 Licenses and Copyright Notices All original copyright holders are still the original copyright holders of the creative works used in this combined work, especially including, but not limited to, Goldhawk Interactive™. All original work of the X-Division project is owned by the creative content holder of the project, at the current moment @Charon. All contributions towards X-Division implicitely issue the current creative content holder a revocable license, which allows the useage, copying, altering and distrubtion of such content, unless otherwisely stated, issued in a written form. As it pertains to the original creative content of the X-Division project, you may: [] rehost such content unless otherwise stated (revocable), as long as the original authors and contributors are prominently displayed. You are not allowed to: [] modifiy the content and redistribute it under your own name You are encouraged to: [] Create your own creative content based on this project, host it and name this project as its prerequisite. [] When such standalone creative content has proven to not cause gameplay instabilities, is useful and desired by the community you may request the integration of your content into the project by issueing a revocable license for your creative content to use, copy, alter and distribute it, as well as make yourself heard that you desire such integration. The installer is proprietary software of the development team for which the X-Division team paid and holds a license for. Its use, copying and redistribution is allowed under the following, revocable license: --- License Terms start Revocable permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to use, copy and redistribute the Software subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. --- License Terms end These are also known as the "Dont sue me when your PC catches on fire" terms. 4. Known Bugs ( at least until the next patch ) Units can spawn outside map tiles in base attacks - If that happens make sure you did in that mission what you wanted to do, then save and exit. Start the game with the Xenonauts_gc_editor.exe in mods/xce/... and load up your save. Press "V" to kill every non xenonaut unit. Save and exit and continue to play like normal. 5. Some things before you start 6. Credits A big thank you from the team for being such an awesome community. You made it possibly that we are able to release the final version of X-Division now. I especially want to thank the team who made it possible and accompanied X-Division through its various stages of development. @Solver Who is totally not a member of the X-Divison development team. I want to thank you for giving the much needed code support and all the new and fantastic features X-Division players are capable of experiencing now. Without him the growing of the game would have already stopped when custom Terror UFOs wouldnt obey the Terror Site Intervall. He made it possible that passionate modders can do what they do best, while silently removing obstacles from the back. In honour of your service i grant you the title of "External X-Division Teammember" @drages The main developer and creator of X-Division. Without him all of this Insanity would have never started. He had the vision, made the plan and strifed to fullfill it throughout many years. It is only because of him that we can finish this game today. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. @DrakuOne of the oldest members of X-Division. He did most of the grunt and testing work during the most active development cycles. Aint no Palace without somebody to actually do the work. @sfarrelly The string guy. He wrote most of the research preview entries. If you know what you are going to research than it is totally because of him. @Phoenix1x+52For doing the total insane hercules task of playing through the game from A to Z. He tested everything from the working things to the not so working things and recorded everyhing for sake of me examinating every pixel in the recordings. That X-Division is in such a bug-free and balanced state is mainly because of his work epic. He has been supporting X-Division through all its stages ( hm, installer ) and has been a loyal friend to the end. Many Kudos to you. @Maerafor giving moral support and a lot of enthusiams for new maps. @Marandor1 The second tester in command. He tried his hardest to convince me to make the game more fun than me trying to make it challenging. You can judge for yourself if he succeeded. @SvinedrengenFor making some good maps. and ofcourse ... @community for all the advice, suggestions, support and love that you gave for the game. Without you the journey wouldnt have been worthwhile. You created, enriched and made the game into what it is today. Thank you for being there on this journey. I will see you in the game . Thank you for everybody who i didnt mention but was still part of this journey. A big thanks to @Chris for making Xenonauts. Enjoy ! The next three posts were the continuation of the OP, please take a moment to glance over it.

We've released the first "prototype" build for Milestone 5 on our Experimental branch (instructions on how to access it here). Milestone 5 introduces several major new mechanics to the Geoscape and adds significant amounts of new content to the tactical combat. All limits on playable time have been removed from the campaign, and it is now possible to unlock and complete the final mission in order to win the campaign. This is currently a rough prototype build of Milestone 5 which is fully playable, but likely to contain bugs and missing content (e.g. some missing research art / research text, some placeholder UI, no victory cinematic, etc). We will be releasing regular updates for Milestone 5 while it remains on the Experimental branch, and it will only be released on the standard branches once we have added the remaining content into the game and we are happy with stability and game balance. TL;DR - this build contains a lot of upgrades but is unfinished. If you're not interested in being a tester, you'll enjoy this update a lot more if you wait until it appears on the main Steam / GOG branch! KEY CONTENT: Battleship UFO: the Battleship is the final alien UFO. It is extremely powerful in the air combat and is a large multi-level UFO with a large crew of the most elite aliens defenders in the tactical combat - successfully capturing one therefore provides the player vast quantities of Alloys and Alenium! Operation Endgame: it is now possible to unlock Operation Endgame and complete the campaign with a high-stakes assault on the alien high command. We made this a two-part mission in homage to the Cydonia mission from classic X-Com, and we created an entirely new set of terrain tiles for the first part! Supporter System: each of the six funding regions on the Geoscape now contains four Supporters, representing important VIPs in the local area. Each Supporter provides your organisation with a permanent bonus when recruited (there are five types of Supporter), and a unique Region Bonus is also unlocked if all the Supporters in a region are recruited. However, UFO missions can also cause Supporters to fall under alien control - becoming Infiltrators, who slowly raise Panic in the local area until you assign the resources required to eliminate them. This system makes the Geoscape much more engaging, giving the player far more choice about their playstyle. Strategic Operation: the same currency used to recruit Supporters can alternatively be used on Strategic Operations, which provide an instant benefit such as an injection of cash or a shipment of alien materials. Importantly, this also gives players a method of quickly reducing Panic in a specific region - something many players have been requesting for a long time. Invasion Phases: the campaign has been divided into five different phases that better explain the progression of the invasion, with some phases introducing or removing new mechanics to reflect the changing alien invasion strategy. New Missions: two new tactical missions set on an alien orbital station take place towards the end of the game, adding more mission variety to second half of the campaign. New Aliens: there's a couple of new alien units - the Eternal (the alien leader unit), and a small melee creature with a limited lifespan known as the Symbiote which certain enemies can fire at Xenonaut units as a form of living weapon. Civilian Evacuation: civilians on tactical missions can now be interacted with to order them to evacuate. Doing this will cause them to run towards the evacuation zone (next to the Xenonaut dropship) and leave the map - assuming no aliens kill them on the way! KEY BALANCE CHANGES: Doomsday / Panic: Individual regions do not suffer Panic in the first couple of months of the campaign. Instead, there is a single global "Doomsday" counter which must be kept below 100. This is mostly for narrative reasons, but in game design terms it gives the player more time set themselves up before needing to worry about keeping Panic down in each individual region. Base Regional Pricing: Xenonaut bases now vary in price between $500k and $1.5m depending where in the world you place them, with the optimal locations in terms of radar coverage (e.g. North Africa / Middle East, Latin America, etc) being more expensive. This means there are more viable strategies in terms of base placement, and also means new players end up with more starting funds if they unwittingly place their first base in a "bad" location. UFO "Delegation" System: once the player has completed two crash sites for a specific UFO type, enough data has been gathered about that particular UFO to allow local military forces to take over future crash sites of that type. The Xenonauts are given a permanent increase in monthly funding, but the player is expected to claim the cash bounty on any future Crash Sites of that type rather than manually completing the mission - ignoring this will increase Panic by damaging relations with the local region (who want the alien materials from the Crash Site for their own purposes). This system has been added because it was very difficult to balance the game when some players complete only a single Crash Site for each specific UFO type, whereas others would fight every single UFO crash site they create (even if they find it grindy and repetitive) simply because the extra money / resources generated by doing so made it the optimal way to play the game. The new Panic penalty means there's now costs as well as benefits associated with fighting more than two Crash Sites of a particular type - but the penalty isn't *that* big and is limited only to a single region, so in some cases it can still be worthwhile. 50%-150% Damage Randomisation: in Milestone 4 weapons (both human and alien) inflicted between 50%-200% of their Damage value when they hit the target, but this has now been reduced back down to 50%-150%. This makes armour a bit more effective at stopping units being instantly killed by a single enemy hit. Strategy - Full Gameplay Changes: As covered in the Key Changes section above, we've added several new strategic mechanics such as Strategic Operations, Supporters, and the Invasion Phase system. Additionally, the Base Regional Pricing and UFO Delegation system significantly change the game balance. It's worth highlighting that the "Reduce Panic" strategic operation can be used on lost regions, and if you reduce Panic below 100 and keep it there then that region will rejoin the Funding Council. A new "Geoscape Timer" UI element has been added, which tells you how many days until your next Funding Report and any upcoming narrative event (usually relating to the end of the current Phase). The Campaign Victory / Campaign Loss screen has been updated with proper artwork, flavour text and music. The full campaign stats (e.g. total aliens killed, etc) are now shown for both victory and loss. The introduction of Phases (see Key Changes section) has led to a rebalance of some parts of the invasion: As mentioned in the Key Changes section, Doomsday has replaced Regional Panic for the first couple of months of the campaign. The initial "Cleaner" stage of the game is now a bit shorter and contains fewer missions overall, so each campaign now only contains one of the following mission pairs - Rescue Soldiers / Convoy Ambush, and VIP Extraction / VIP Elimination. Monthly funding is much lower at the start of the game, but increases significantly once Phase 2 begins. Infiltration UFO missions no longer cause Panic, but instead convert neutral Supporters into Infiltrators that generate Panic each month. Infiltrators can be eliminated by spending Operation Points. Alien materials are now more plentiful in the second half of the game. Item sale prices that have fallen (as a result of selling those items) now regain some of the lost value at the end of each month. A few changes have been made to the tech tree: Research speed is 10% faster on Soldier and 20% faster on Recruit Research project durations have been decreased by 10%-20% for projects in the second half of the game on all difficulties. Removed the Alien Officer Interrogation and Alien Leader Interrogation placeholder plot research, and replaced them with plot-related research related to UOO-1. The second-stage Corpse Analysis engineering projects have been removed, meaning there is now a single Corpse Analysis that grants +20% damage for each alien species. An (expensive) engineering project has been added to upgrade the speed of Angel interceptors to match that of Phantom interceptors. An engineering project has been added to improve the protection of Guardian Armour (unlocked by researching Alien Plasma Weapons). As both Stalker Armour and Colossus Armour are somewhat specialised, Guardian Armour remains the mainline armour for quite a while! Added an upgraded variant of the Stun Baton called the Electroshock Baton (unlocked from Advanced Stun Weapons research). The Quantum Laboratory and Nanotech Workshop upgrades now require Alien Electronics in addition to completion of the Cleaner Base mission (meaning they arrive a couple of months later). The research projects for Cleaner Autopsy and Cleaner Interrogation now autocomplete, as they are rendered redundant before most people complete them. The Cleaner Corpse Analysis engineering projects have been removed entirely for the same reason. The power consumption of various base structures has been rebalanced. The quick summary is: Power consumption of many buildings has been slightly increased, including the Hangar and Living Quarters (which previously did not require power). Power production of the Access Lift and the basic Generators has been reduced (Alenium Generators remain unchanged). Your starting base now contains an additional Generator to compensate. The overall effect of this is that new bases can only construct a single Hangar and Radar with the power from the Access Lift, and expanding the base further requires construction of additional Generators. There's been some minor updates to the air combat: Torpedoes are now faster and Missiles are now slower, so the Torpedoes will hit the target first if both are fired at the same time (usually desirable because they are very effective at destroying Armour, allowing subsequent Missile hits to inflict higher damage). The weapons on the Cruiser / Abductor UFOs now do reduced damage and have smaller fire arcs. Evasive Roll now travels a consistent distance whatever speed the air combat is set to. Tactical Combat - Full Gameplay Changes: The Civilian Evacuation system allows you to click on a civilian from an adjacent tile, which causes them to path towards the evacuation zone near the dropship as quickly as possible. This does not cost TU to use. Note that evacuating civilians will try to sprint past any threats they encounter, so make sure their escape route is safe! Building roofs are now destructible. Units / objects will fall down to the level below if the floor beneath them is destroyed, and if they land on another actor / object then they both will be stunned or destroyed. Sloped building roofs now correctly block line of sight and shots / throwable objects from all angles, Units now only rotate to face their attacker after taking damage on the enemy turn. Having it occur in the player turn could cause frustration, as soldiers hit by enemy reaction fire would rotate towards their attacker and sometimes be left without enough TU to complete their planned actions. Suppressing a unit now reduces their Reflexes by 50%, which makes them easier to hit with melee weapons. Performing melee attacks on hostile units now grants attribute progress towards improving Reflexes. Mind Control is now properly broken if the alien is killed or stunned. Hay now costs additional TU to move through, and is crushed the first time any unit moves through them. This penalty does not apply if the unit doing so is Crushing (e.g. vehicles, Colossus Armour). You can now set a move path to an obstructed tile that contains a unit or a terrain object under the shroud, although unit movement will end once the obstruction is revealed (this prevents players "scanning" the shroud to identify what is there). Alien Changes: Eternals have been added to the game on Battleships and inside the largest Alien Bases. Psyon "Mesmerise" ability can now only be used once per turn by each Psyon. Some Mantids now carry Symbiote Launchers, which fire eggs towards their enemies that hatch into Symbiotes - small, aggressive melee aliens that only live three turns, Sebillians now carry LMGs instead of Rifles, and some been issued with a special type of grenade that spawns large clouds of poison gas. Wraith soldiers now have a 30% chance of spawning with a grenade. Wraith Cloaking Field is now disabled by stun damage (as well as normal damage). Cyberdrone weapon is now an AOE weapon that fires 3 explosive shots (damage per shot has been reduced). Androns and Cyberdrones should no longer seek cover, nor back off if facing large numbers of hostile units. Androns should no longer crush alien doors when moving around UFOs / alien bases. Cleaners are no longer hostile to civilians / local forces on certain map types. AI units of all kinds should no longer clump together quite as much as before. Weapon Changes: The maximum deviation on a missed shot is now 10 degrees. As well as looking more realistic, this makes the HEVY more effective. A couple of bugfixes related to the way corners (e.g. walls, doorframes) and fire arcs are treated for missed shots have made the HEVY less likely to blow up the user unexpectedly. Cleaner Accelerated Rifle now has identical stats to the Accelerated Rifle. Demolition grenades now spawn smoke and fire on detonation. Usability Changes: Pressing R will now reload your weapon. The tactical combat camera now returns to its previous position after the enemy turn has been processed. The currently selected soldier now displays with orange shading if obstructed by cover, rather than green. This makes it much easier to see which soldier in the dropship is currently selected. Ambush maps now reveal the position of all enemies during deployment, so you can better choose where to deploy your soldiers. Added camera scroll from the target soldiers to the rest of your team at the start of the Rescue Soldiers mission. Scrolling between soldiers in the tactical inventory can be done using up / down, as well as left / right (this mirrors the Soldier Equip screen). UI Improvements: We've added an "abort mission" button to the tactical combat UI, as not everyone was aware you could access it through the Esc menu. The soldier minitabs along the top of the tactical UI now also display the secondary weapon if the primary weapon is a combat shield. Mind controlled units remain in the topbar minitabs (but cannot be interacted with, as if the soldier was dead). On missions with a pre-battle deployment phase, the "Commence Mission" button no longer softlocks the game for a couple of seconds after pressing it. On Data Raid missions, if you return all the soldiers to the dropship without having sabotaged enough computers for the mission to count as a victory, the game will now spawn a pop-up telling you this and asking if you want to end the mission anyway. Updated the Data Raid objective text to be slightly clearer about how many computer desks need to be interacted with for victory. Added tooltips to the post-mission debrief screen for the soldier promotion icon, and the soldier kills icons. Visual / Audio Updates: Fix various kinds of minor visual issues in lots of different tactical maps. Added various new terrain tiles for the tactical combat. These are mostly alien tiles related to the new missions (e.g. Operation Endgame, Battleship UFO, the alien orbital missions, etc) but there's some visual updates to the Farm biome and a new oil pumpjack prop for the Desert biome. Added new 3d models for the Wraiths, including entirely new designs for the heavily-armoured elite Wraiths. Added Soldier Equip screen paperdoll artwork for the various advanced MARS / ARES weapons. Added new or updated sound effects for: Ambient sounds for various tactical biomes and strategic UI screens Winning or losing a tactical mission Accelerated and Gauss weapons Alien Fusion weapons MARS / ARES / Sentry Gun movement and death sounds MARS / ARES rocket turret weapon Dropships now have a new take-off sound when launching on the Geoscape (instead of sounding like jet fighters). Bugfixes: Fixed another rare multi-threading crash related to saving the game. Fixed several issues where the game could crash when moving inventory items (both on the Soldier Equip screen and the tactical inventory). Fixed a crash that could occur if you accidentally killed The General in ATLAS Base with an explosive weapon before he had been revealed from the shroud. Fixed a crash that could (rarely) occur on enemy overwatch fire. Fixed zombies incorrectly spawning two Reapers when stunned, which could then cause a crash in some circumstances. Fixed an issue where a teleporter would still trigger if a unit ended a move on it due to their move being interrupted (e.g. by spotting an alien, or because of enemy reaction fire). Fixed a bug where most of the crew of Harvester UFOs were not spawning (the ones that were meant to be inside the UFO). Fixed some abduction missions loading incorrect map variants with too few abduction tubes. Fixed a bug where soldiers would sometimes not carry out move actions even though the UI tells you there are enough TU to do so. Fixed a pathing calculation issue where the game would sometimes tell you a soldier lacked enough TU to reach a tile, but would then recalculate and allow a longer movement if you chose a different tile. Fixed some pathfinding issues for jetpack-equipped soldiers, where the game was incorrectly claiming a "path cannot be found" if the soldier did not have enough TU to reach the spot (rather than showing how far the unit could move). Fixed pathfinding incorrectly calculating costs for units with Crushing making moves that involved crushing multiple objects. Fixed interrupted soldier moves not always reimbursing the player with the correct number of TUs. Fixed an issue where units would sometimes not turn if attacking as part of a move >> shoot preview action, leading to their arms facing a completely different direction to their torso. Fixed some (but not all) instances of shroud drawing over materials with transparency, such as the glass parts of alien abduction tubes etc. Fixed an issue where fleeing aliens would often flee directly towards your units. Fixed an issue where the shroud would sometimes not be revealed on certain tiles, even if a unit walked into them. Fixed some displayed "hit chance" labels being offset when passing through certain types of smoke. Fixed some displayed "hit chance" labels being offset in certain camera circumstances. Fixed the issue where destroying a shipping container would often not destroy the ladder attached to it. Fixed an issue where certain dropped items could not be picked up. Fixed destroyed splinters of wood hovering in the air after destroying certain sawmill walls. Fixed a UI bug where selecting soldiers on the Manage Soldier screen would cause the Training Capacity bar to decrease. Fixed the Ultimate Power achievement (all Colonels in a squad) being unlocked if you play a base defence mission containing only Sentry Guns. Fixed the Psyon Mesmerise triggering incorrectly when a "missed" shot from an explosive weapon kills the Psyon. Fixed an issue where in some circumstances the UI would show the fire mode icons for the medikit on top of the normal fire mode icons for a pistol in the other hand. Removed a duplicate soldier role icon. Fixed an issue where thrown grenades would sometimes get stuck in mid-air and explode on the wrong tile (or leave flares floating in mid-air.) Fixed EMP Damage and Stun Damage numbers incorrectly being shown on Commander difficulty, when normal damage numbers are not. Fixed the tooltip for the Stalker Armour showing the linked tooltip for the Wraith Cloaking Field, not the human equivalent. Fixed the Colossus tooltip not having enough space to display the various effects. Fixed Soldier Equip screen item comparison issues that caused the currently equipped weapon to display error text instead of its ammo capacity.

Our Milestone 4 update to Xenonauts 2 has now officially been released! This update will break existing saved games, but if you want to keep playing your existing campaigns please switch to our Legacy branches where Milestone 3 is still available (instructions on how to do so here). We will be monitoring bug reports closely over the next couple of weeks, and we'll investigate and hotfix any issues raised by the community - so please do report any bugs you encounter! Developer Commentary & Key Changes This update is a big one - it adds a new UFO, a new alien race, a new suit of Xenonaut soldier armour, many new maps, and probably the largest update to the game balance since the game released. It is still not yet possible to complete the campaign (that's planned for Milestone 5), but the game now contains every UFO type except for the Battleship! Please let us know what you think about the game balance in Milestone 4 in the dedicated Milestone 4 Balance & Feedback thread, as we'll be considering community feedback while we work on Milestone 5! Harvester UFO The Harvester is the sixth largest of the seven UFO types that can create Crash Sites, with only the Battleship (which is arriving in Milestone 5) being larger and more powerful. It is primarily a transport craft that replaces the Abductor UFO on most mission types, but in addition to the normal beam weapons it also fires homing missiles similar to those used by the Observer UFO. In the tactical combat it has two interior variants and can hold a sizeable crew of well-equipped elite aliens. Androns Androns are robotic alien soldiers with a lot of Armour but average Hit Points that accompany Wraith crews on Terror Sites and on Abductor-class UFOs and above. Although they are very tough, they are vulnerable to EMP damage or anything that can break their armour. Androns were in some of the (pre-Early Access) Kickstarter builds of Xenonauts 2, but their original models / animations didn't look particularly good and they had integrated arm-cannon weapons that were difficult for players to identify. We're much happier with the updated models and animations, and since the new Androns carry weapons in the conventional manner it's now much easier to spot which ones have Fusion weapons! Colossus Battlesuit The Colossus Battlesuit was originally intended to be the "ultimate" Xenonaut soldier armour, but we subsequently decided it would be better to swap it with the Exosuit (which has now been renamed the Vanguard Battlesuit). The hulking Colossus is therefore the first (and most primitive) iteration of battlesuit technology, offering excellent protection but suffering from several major limitations that do not affect the more advanced Vanguard. In gameplay terms, the Colossus offers very high Armour and grants the user 100 Strength, but reduces the wearer's Vision Range by -3 tiles and their Reflexes by -20. It is also only able to wield Machine Gun-type weapons, and cannot use grenades or equip modules. When the Vanguard becomes available, the Colossus can be upgraded in the Workshop to further improve its Armour. The idea is that a handful of Colossus suits could remain viable in the final stage of the game, where they can be used as specialised heavy assault units. Game Rebalance We've completely rebalanced the strategy layer and the UFO crews for Milestone 4 to respond to player feedback. There were frequent complaints that Milestone 3 was too stingy with funding once you got past the midpoint of the campaign, making it difficult to build the advanced interceptors required to defend the world. This should now be fixed, and funding is now once again linked to regional Panic - but most events that affect Panic (both positively and negatively) now also have a small global effect on Panic. This means Panic will not rise so quickly in undefended regions if you are doing a good job of protecting other parts of the world. Interceptor equipment is now available in unlimited quantities once researched (with engineering projects globally upgrading these items into improved versions once researched). The community feedback from Milestone 3 was overwhelmingly that having to build individual weapons and armour items for your aircraft felt too heavy on the micromanagement, but we also found that it discouraged many players from experimentating with different aircraft loadouts. This change should therefore give players more freedom to experiment with different tactics in the air combat. Finally, we've also smoothed out the difficulty curve for both the air combat and the tactical combat, as there were several spots where it could feel rather unfair. To maintain the challenge in the later stages of the campaign, we've rebalanced the alien mission crews and added more powerful "heavy" variants of several existing units like the Mentarch, Servitor and Cyberdrone. You can see from the full changelogs below that we've changed a LOT of things - in general, we think Milestone 4 should be a better balanced and more enjoyable player experience than previous version of the game were! BALANCE CHANGES: Strategy: Added Harvester UFO. Added Colossus Battlesuit soldier armour. This offers excellent protection, 100 Strength, and the ability to smash through walls like a vehicle. However, it also reduces the wearer's Reflexes and Vision Range, and can only wield certain weapons. Added Sentinel Module, which grants soldiers 180-degree vision cones. Added Reinforced Shield, which is the final upgrade for the Combat Shield and Assault Shield. Added Energy Knife weapon, which is an upgraded version of the Combat Knife. Added new Corpse Analysis engineering projects for the Servitor, Cyberdrone and Andron enemies. 50% of your funding is now modified by the Panic score in local regions, and shooting down UFOs now grants a small global Panic reduction in addition to the larger local Panic reduction. This restores the link between funding and managing Panic levels, but ensures you do not need to immediately rush interceptor coverage across the whole globe on higher difficulty settings. The invasion has been tweaked so that the player needs to run fewer missions in the first couple of months of the campaign. The appearance of Scout UFOs and Destroyer UFOs has been moved forward slightly, and the Cleaner Base is discovered a little later. This means the time spent using each tech tier of equipment is spread more evenly. Base structures are now more expensive in general, and the Medical Center and Training Room are now much more expensive. Aircraft now take longer to build and are more expensive, and have reduced fuel range on the Geoscape. However, their equipment is cheaper (see below) and they now refund 50% of their construction cost when sold. Aircraft equipment is no longer individually constructed in the workshop. Starting equipment and weapons are unlimited quantity, and these can be globally upgraded to higher tiers via engineering projects. Two additional placeholder plot objectives added to the campaign: capture an alien officer, and capture an alien leader. These will be replaced in Milestone 5, but for now they just increase monthly funding when completed. You no longer pay upkeep costs on aircraft that are still under construction, or queued in the engineering project list. Air Combat: We've tweaked the stats of several UFOs downwards to account for the fact they appear a little earlier in the game. Hunter-Killer missiles on the Observer and Abductor now inflict less damage, and are slightly less maneuverable. The difficulty modifier (set on the Campaign Settings) was previously broken, but will now correctly increase / decrease the damage inflicted by UFO weapons. Fixed a bug where the autoresolved air combat was previously still using the UFO HP / Armour modifiers based on the number of interceptors used (making UFOs easier if you had 1 plane, and harder if you had 3). Tactical Combat: Added new Andron alien units, plus more powerful variants of existing units in the later stages of the campaign (Heavy Mentarch, Heavy Servitor, Heavy Cyberdrone, and Reaper Alpha). Melee weapons no longer have a 100% hit chance against aliens. The base hit chance of melee weapons is about 60%, and this is increased or decreased based on the difference between the attacker's Reflexes and defender's Reflexes (so the hit chance against inanimate objects remains 100%). Additionally, performing melee attacks on hostile targets now grants progress points towards increasing Reflexes. You can no longer heal enemy units, as this allowed players to get into several potential crash situations. As they cannot be healed, unconscious aliens no longer suffer damage from any Bleeding Wounds they have prior to being stunned. The civilian / local forces turn now occurs before the alien turn, which means it's now possible for the local forces to heroically save your troops from being killed by aliens. Stunned Xenonaut soldiers equipped with an Automed Unit will now automatically revive themselves when it triggers at end of turn. MARS and other robotic units no longer suffer Accuracy reduction due to injury. ARES now has 100HP instead of 80HP. This means it has the same base HP value as the MARS, but it has stronger armour which makes it tougher overall. Various updates made to the alien invasion: The aliens in each UFOs / ground missions have been updated to improve consistency. There are now three main alien races (Psyons, Sebillians, Wraiths) with different supporting units for each species - although in Alien Base missions you can encounter enemies of any type. Abduction missions now contain Cleaners as well as aliens until the Cleaner HQ is destroyed. The number of aliens is reduced if Cleaners are present, but overall the missions get slightly easier once the Cleaner HQ is destroyed. The aliens in the Cleaner HQ mission no longer have Plasma weapons unless it's past day 120, as this was unlocking the corresponding tech earlier than expected. Various updates made to weapons and armour: Stalker Armour cloaking field defensive bonus reduced from -2 Accuracy to -1.5 Accuracy per tile. Non-sniper weapons now generate a bit more of their hit chance from proximity, meaning they have a higher hit chance at close range (generally about +10%) but a lower hit chance at long range. Pistol - range reduced from 12 tiles to 10 tiles but short range bonus increased from 2.25% to 4%, and accuracy multiplier reduced by 5% on each fire mode. Overall this makes the pistol more deadly, but at the cost of 2 tiles of range. Shotgun - range reduced from 10 tiles to 9 tiles but short range bonus increased from 6.25% per tile to 7.5% per tile. Slight nerf to firing costs, which have increased to 30% and 43% (from 28% and 40%). Rifle - increased short range bonus by 0.5% per tile for 20 tiles, decreased Accuracy multiplier by 5% on each fire mode. Machineguns- significantly buffed as they no longer lose Accuracy after the soldier has moved for the first time each turn. Same changes to short range bonus vs Accuracy multiplier as the Rifle. Sniper Rifle - this weapon has not changed. HEVY Launcher - this weapon has been significantly buffed. It is now an arc-fire weapon rather than a direct-fire weapon and now has a maximum range of 25 tiles, which makes it significantly stronger (unless you're indoors where the ceiling limits the range). The scattering on missed shots has been updated to ensure they don't always catch the target in the blast area, but it's still much more likely to happen than when it was a direct-fire weapon. Combat Knife - increased damage by 10%, and reduced its weight so it is no longer heavier than the pistol. Stun Gun - reduced the suppression to 15 (from 23) Various updates made to specific aliens: Androns have been added to the game. These formidable robotic alien soldiers have very high armour but relatively low HP, cannot be suppressed, and appear as support units for Wraiths on Terror missions and inside larger UFOs. Wraith "Cloaking Field" ability now reduces the shooter's Accuracy, rather than inflicting a flat penalty on overall Hit Chance. This means Hit Chance gained from proximity is unaffected by Cloaking Field, and weapons with a naturally low hit chance per shot (e.g. machineguns) are no longer disproportionately affected compared to single-shot weapon types. Wraith HP values have been reduced by 20%. Sebillian Time Units increased to 75 (from 60), and Reflexes increased to 50 (from 25). Psyon Officers and Psyon Leaders are now equipped with a Psi-Amp weapon, which acts like a Plasma Pistol Pistol but completely ignores armour. We'll likely expand this in Milestone 5 so Bravery or Morale offer some kind of defence against it. Various updates made to specific missions, generally to improve the rewards offered or make time limits a bit less punishing: Alien Base missions are now always treated as night missions. The spawn regions on Ambush missions have been reduced by 3 tiles, so you can't spawn quite as close to the Cleaner convoy. The soldiers you are rescuing in the Rescue Soldier missions are now each also carrying a Briefcase of Money item (value: $50,000). All Abduction missions now have a base duration of 7 turns (the first mission previously had 6, all others had 8) Eliminate VIP missions now have 2 turns longer before enemy reinforcements arrive, and they now give a $200k rewards for victory. VIP Extraction missions now have 1 turn longer before enemy reinforcements arrive, and have 1 fewer enemy. They also now give a $200k reward for victory. Cleaner Base mission now awards 50 Alloys and 50 Alenium on completion. Cleaner reinforcements now spawn with 50% Time Units, instead of zero Time Units. Cleaner reinforcements now escalate more quickly, with subsequent waves of reinforcements coming 3 turns after the first reinforcements and having twice as many enemies (this is to discourage people from spawn camping them). GAMEPLAY / CONTENT CHANGES: Strategy: General: Added a new "bug reporter" tool which you can access by pressing F11. This will create a .zip file which contains all recent logs and saves, and can easily be attached to any bug report on the Discord or our forums to ensure we have all the information we need to find the issue. General: Added a small checkbox on the tactical mission loading screen that sets the game to auto-launch into the tactical combat once loading is complete (rather than waiting for you to press Begin Mission). The checkbox setting is persistent between missions. General: Added a significant number of new sound effects to various parts of the strategy layer. General: Added art for the Probe UFO and Nanofabrication research projects. General: Added a black background to the strategy UI that will be revealed if people play on ultra-ultra-widescreen monitors (i.e. anything more than 21:9 aspect ratio). Geoscape: Funding Report expanded to show the "base funding" value for each region, plus the funding modifier driven by the Panic level in that region. Any missions / research projects that increase monthly funding now list values as increases in terms of base funding (the amount you'll actually get at month end varies based on the Panic in each region). Geoscape: After completing a Corpse Analysis engineering project which unlocks further engineering projects, the popup now offers to take you to the Engineering screen rather than the Research screen. Geoscape: Added a kill count for each soldier on the post-mission debrief screen (each kill shown as an alien skull) Base: Added the building tooltip to the constructable buildings list. Base: The Training Rate value now shows decimals where appropriate, as each Interrogation increases the rate by 0.5. Base Stores: Alien Psi-Amp, Alien Grenades and Alien Advanced Grenades are now marked as Junk item for sale purposes. Research: Fixed the Xenopedia entry for the Scout UFO incorrectly reporting it was Evasive. Aircraft: The generic soldier icons on the dropship soldier arrangement screen have now been replaced by soldier role icons, which should make it much easier to tell your soldiers apart. Aircraft: Increased the size of the aircraft hardpoint equipment menu so you can see more available items at once. Aircraft: When viewing a dropship, the soldier list now increases in size as the dropship capacity increases (rather than a scrollbar being added). Aircraft: The "Choose Aircraft Name" panel now has a cancel button, and can be closed by pressing Esc. Aircraft: Updated the tooltip on button confirming aircraft relocation. Soldier Equip: Injured soldiers and wounded soldiers now use different colours, making the two states easier to distinguish between. Soldier Equip: Right-clicking a soldier in the Unassigned soldier list will now automatically assign them to an available slot in the dropship (i.e. the inverse of the right-click fast unassignment you can do on the list of soldiers assigned to a dropship). Soldier Equip: Updated the tooltip on the Select Soldier button shown on empty dropship slots. Soldier Equip: Fixed the Vanguard (Exosuit) light / heavy armour paperdoll variants not being consistently positioned. Soldier Equip: The "War Machine" achievement now unlocks from equipping the Vanguard Battlesuit rather than the Colossus. Soldier Equip: When players attempt a second mission without the dropship first returning to base, surviving soldiers receive equipment using the round robin method (assuming there is not enough to go around). Previously the first soldier would take all items set in their loadout, then the second would take all the items in their loadout, etc - which would cause problems if there wasn't enough items to go around (e.g. the first soldier would be issued mulitiple ammo magazines, but the last soldier wouldn't even get one to load into their weapon). Soldier Equip: Several updates to make soldier planned loadouts (i.e. the loadouts of soldiers that aren't in the dropship) more intuitive and useful: A pop-up message is now generated if you assign new soldiers to the dropship and the base stores does not have enough items to fill their planned loadout (which leads to soldiers not having some items equipped). Item quantities on the Soldier Equip screen now display as "X / Y" where X is the number currently in the base stores, and Y is the total number you own (including any equipped on your soldiers). You can now drag items into planned loadouts even if the base stores contains 0 of those items. Air Combat: Tthe first interceptor is now automatically selected when you begin a battle. The rotation arc for UFO weapons that are capable of rotating is now displayed. Hovering over either Evasive Roll button now displays a "ghost" plane that shows where the interceptor will end up. Different UFOs / aircraft may now have different cooldowns for evasive roll. The sizes of UFOs in the air combat has been updated to improve their relative scale. Tactical Combat: Almost 40 new maps have been added to the game (~30x Harvester Crash Site maps, 5x Alien Base maps, 1x Cleaner Base map, 1x Cleaner Data Raid) Further improvements have been made to the AI. Additionally, armed civilians should no longer be interested in going inside UFOs. Disabled various doors from autoclosing (UFO doors, alien base doors, blast doors in Xenonaut / Cleaner bases) as a temporary fix for the issue where the visual open / closed state of doors gets out of sync with their actual open / closed state. Cover objects with walkable floor tiles on top (shipping containers, caravans, buses, etc) are now linked in terms of destruction, which means destroying the object will remove the walkable tiles. Units stood on these tiles will fall to the ground. The Toggle Roof button is now functional and the visual behaviour of roofs has changed. Now roofs are shown by default, and will hide automatically when a soldier gains vision over any tile inside the building (previously roofs would always be hidden if you had the camera at level 1). After clicking the Toggle Roof button, the roof visibility will be forced on. Updated the way mouse targeting works when units are on top of objects that you cannot go inside (e.g. cliffs, shipping containers) so that you don't have to move the camera up to their level to click on them. Updated the camera behaviour when enemy reinforcements arrive - it now scrolls through any newly spawned enemy units. Updated the camera behaviour at end of turn when bleeding wounds, regeneration or the Automed Unit is being used - the camera will now scroll through all affected units in turn and show any healing or damage effects. When in grenade / medikit targeting mode, the game will no longer preview the portrait / stats of other soldiers when you hover over their minitabs at the top of the screen (because doing this cancelled the grenade / medikit use). Soldiers marked as "done" for the turn in the tactical combat now have a green tick below their minitab. The minimum hit chance required for units to perform overwatch is now 10% and soldiers will not fire their weapons at targets beyond the maximum range of their weapon (which would inflict reduced damage). Improved the auto-pathing when using a melee / heal item on a target several tiles away, so it correctly finds the shortest path and doesn't get confused by intervening walls. Improved the path prediction code to prevent situations where the move path would show soldiers being able to move a shorter distance than they were actually able to. Abduction tubes now play the teleport animation and teleport sound when they disappear midway through an Abduction mission due to the timer expiring. Climbing a ladder now plays footstep sounds. Melee attacks now occur more quickly after the player clicks the attack button. Sped up Mentarch firing animation. The Valkyrie dropship now has side doors which automatically open as units pass through them (this does not cost TU). As they have windows, they do not block vision - but they do stop alien reaction fire hitting soldiers still inside the dropship! Stopped open Xenonaut Base / ATLAS Base blast doors triggering the shut door icon, which blocks other click commands. All walls within the Abductor UFO are now destructible. Optimised the cabbage fields in the Farm maps Various small visual updates: Updated 3d models for the basic Secton and Wraith aliens, and new models for the human Fusion Pistol, Fusion Shotgun and Fusion Sniper Rifle. Updated environment art for the command room in the ATLAS Base mission, adding a proper command table and wall screens that better resemble those on the main menu artwork. Updated the art on the Fusion Charge so it glows fusion green rather than plasma blue. Slightly updated the Gauss Shotgun art so it's easier to differentiate at a glance from the Gauss Rifle. Retextured all the various roller doors in the game, and removed all the static roller doors in the Western Town and replaced them with roller doors that can be opened. Fixed z-fighting issues with some of the ATLAS base corridor tiles and the fog of war shader. Fixed some alignment issues for the wall corner tiles in the Xenonaut Base / ATLAS Base map Fixed a visual issue on one of the Western Town petrol station buildings BUGFIXES: Strategy: Geoscape: Fixed the mission information UI incorrectly displaying some dummy information if you have built a Quantum Array. Geoscape: Fixed an issue where redirecting an aircraft in flight would not spawn the multi-select box if you clicked a target in close proximity to another possible target. Geoscape: Fixed some issues to do with the UFO take-off process that should help avoid the situation where a UFO spends days flying around the map while repeatedly taking off and landing. Geoscape: Aircraft icon no longer disappears if aircraft circumnavigates the map more than once in a single direction Geoscape: Fixed clicking-and-holding to move map while in base construction mode acting placing the base when you release the mouse. Geoscape: Fixed the nightshadow not extending all the way to the bottom of the map. Geoscape: Destroyed Xenonaut bases no longer prevent the player building another base nearby. Research: Fixed in-progress research projects not showing a duration if the remaining time was between 23 and 24 hours. Base Stores: Fixed pressing Esc on the Transfer Items screen not returning to the Geoscape like it does on other strategy UI screens. Soldiers: Fixed there being spots in the Soldier list where the mouse scrollwheel would not allow you to scroll the list. Soldier Equip: Guardian "Heavy Armour" module now correctly remembers whether it was enabled or disabled when changing armour (like the heavy armour modules for other armours do). Soldier Equip: Fixed wounded soldiers in the dropship visually having no armour while travelling back to base. Soldier Equip: Fixed the flicker that would occur in the bottom left list before you access the screen for the first time. Soldier Equip: Fixed this screen starting with the the Equipment tab selected in the Armory, not the Weapons tab. Soldier Equip: Fixed custom loadout names not having a maximum length (now limited to 20 characters). Soldier Equip: Fixed players being unable to save loadout changes if all they changed was toggling the Heavy Armour toggle on / off. Aircraft: Fixed the soldier HP bar that is shown on hover on the Dropship soldier arrangement screen showing inconsistent values when you switch between soldiers. Aircraft: Fixed the inverted keybinds when scrolling through different aircraft. Aircraft: Fixed a bug where the topbar would be hidden if you built a new base and then went directly to the Aircraft screen. Misc: Fixed a few strings that were not being correctly translated. Air Combat: Fixed a crash in the air combat that could occur if you accidentally right-clicked on one of the Evasive Roll buttons. Fixed the air combat maps sometimes containing aircraft deployment regions that don't disappear when the battle begins. Fixed the Air Superiority achievement not unlocking correctly if you were using air combat autoresolve. Tactical Combat: Fixed grenades sometimes not inflicting any damage on terrain when they hit the middle of a large object (such as a clump of trees). Fixed an issue where the you would get vision into the UFO at the start of the turn if the door had started open, even though it then automatically closed itself. Fixed the Western Town restaurant interior walls appearing black on some systems. Fixed the adjacent cover system not correctly disallowing other adjacent cover of similar stopping value. Fixed unconscious civilians / local forces being treated as dead in the mission debrief. Fixed unconscious soldiers with bleeding wounds not taking bleed damage. Prevented the player from healing an unconscious unit if there is another unit stood on their tile, as that would lead to two units occupying the same tile. Fixed another example of soldiers being able to occupy the same tile and get stuck inside each other. Fixed an AI issue with Reapers preventing them from attacking in some circumstances. Wraith active camo ability is no longer reset to being active when loading a saved game. Secton Psionic Triangulation glowing eyes can no longer be seen in the shroud in some circumstances. Secton Psionic triangulation no longer incorrectly triggers off other Sectons in some circumstances. Fixed Psyon Mesmerize incorrectly triggering if a shot misses, hits an explosive object and kills the Psyon. Fixed some mission types not generating autosaves on the first turn. Fixed an AI hang that could occur when an alien unit capable of crushing walls encounters a unit on the other side of the wall Fixed an issue where zooming in / out using the keyboard keys could be too fast if you held down the keys. Fixed some ladders on some of the new Polar maps not being climbable. Fixed the unpathable cliffs on the Polar extraction / ambush maps. Fixed some misaligned road tiles in one of the Cleaner Data Raid missions. Fixed several issues with the Ambush mission trucks having incorrect loot amounts in certain maps. Fixed the large 4x2 oiltank not being correctly removed when destroyed. Fixed being able to see dead bodies inside the crashed UFO in the shroud before the UFO itself becomes visible. Fixed the abduction tubes on Abduction missions being visible in the shroud. Fixed TU reserve mode being left enabled on a weapon after a panicking soldier drops it Fixed TU reserve mode being visually disabled after enemy overwatch occurs Fixed an issue where a teleporter doesn't trigger due to enemy reaction fire occuring as a unit steps onto a teleporter, but the camera still moved up to the higher level as if it had. Fixed an issue where recovering the body of a dead soldier wouldn't also recover the equipped armour on that body (this only applies on lower difficulty settings where armour is not destroyed on death). Fixed the Cleaner reinforcements coming one turn too early for the linked conversation on the Cleaner Data Raid missions. Fixed an issue where the three "On Mission" soldiers would get permanently stuck in the dropship after returning to base if you flew to a Soldier Extraction mission site, then aborted the mission and returned to base. Fixed the camera panning from the dropship objective to the spawn position of your squad on VIP extraction missions also incorrectly happening after loading a save game. Fixed instances where units suffering TU penalties due to insufficient carrying capacity would also have their weapon TU fire costs reduced. Fixed pressing Esc while hovering over an enemy in tactical combat not opening the game menu. Fixed missions incorrectly ending immediately when spawned enemies still remain alive (e.g. Reapers spawned from Zombies). Fixed some flickering on the Cruiser UFO's hull dropshadow. Fixed an issue with the landed Abductor hull that allowed you to see through the hull and reveal the interior from certain angles. Fixed zombified civilians / local forces soldiers not using the zombie animations. Fixed the damaged particles on the yellow power generators displaying strange visual effects when targeted. Fixed abduction tubes continuing to play their humming sound even if they had teleported away due to the mission timer expiring. Fixed freed civilians on Abduction missions not being counted in the post-mission Debrief line about surviving civilians. Fixed VIPs being given flares in night missions. Fixed the teleport animation being visually stretched.

May has been another month of progress for Xenonauts 2. We released the first experimental version of Milestone 4 a couple of weeks ago, an update which brings a lot of new improvements and features to the game. You can read the initial (very long) changelog here, but our work isn't complete yet - we'll be continuing to add new content and fix bugs until we feel the update is ready for general release on the standard Steam / GOG / Epic branches. As always, we greatly appreciate the feedback from members of our community who have played the new version. This help has been invaluable in finding and fixing bugs, and ironing out problems with the game balance. We've got most of the stability issues under control now, which means it's a good time for anyone interested in playing the Experimental build to dive in - and please let us know any thoughts or issues with the game balance in the dedicated Milestone 4 Balance thread! Campaign Balance & Stability: Over the last month we spent a great deal of time playing the campaign in an attempt to get the game balance into reasonable shape before the Experimental release. This seems to have paid off, with the update getting a positive reaction from the community so far. There's not really space to go into specifics about what we've changed (we've tweaked the numbers in a LOT of different places), but the overall difficulty progression and campaign pacing should feel smoother than in previous versions. We've also spent a lot of time fixing bugs. Most of the crash bugs in Milestone 4 have now been fixed, and we're continuing to work through fixes for the other bugs introduced by the new content. In addition to this, we've been working through our backlog of historical bugs (some of which date back to the original Early Access launch), and we've now fixed quite a few of the more serious historical issues too. New Content: We added new content in a few areas last month. Our new sound designer provided a number of new sounds for various parts of the game, such as the soldier equip screen where moving weapons and equipment in soldier inventories previously played no sound. There's now unique sounds for picking up and putting down all sorts of items (also played when switching weapons in the tactical combat), which makes the screen feel much more satisfying to use. We've also added some new 3D models for certain alien variants, some of the human Fusion weapons, and some new terrain pieces for the Farm and Tropical biomes (although these won't appear in the game until Milestone 5). Our level designer has also continued to create new maps for the game; I think we're getting to a pretty good place in terms of map variety now. As per usual, we've added a number of small usability features too - but there's too many of those to list, and individually they're not that exciting. Hopefully you'll notice one or two when you next play the game though! Finally, there's a new bug reporting tool in Milestone 4 that makes it easier for players to report bugs, which can by accessed by pressing F11 and appears automatically after a crash. This just provides a handy zip file of all the files we need to track down bugs, which should make squashing the remaining bugs in the game more straightforward! Conclusion: Our priority for this month is to finish up Milestone 4 and push it out for general release - although we're exactly sure when this will happen, because a lot depends on what feedback we get from our testers and how many bugs we need to fix. However, we'll let everyone know as soon as we're able to set a launch date!

Hello everyone - this month's update covers both December and January, as I was out of the office over new year. We've all returned refreshed from our Christmas break and we hope you all had a good festive season too! Milestone 3: The biggest piece of news is that Milestone 3 is out on our Experimental branches for testing, with the goal of releasing the final version of Milestone 3 onto the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches on February 19th. There's an extensive changelog for Milestone 3 which you can read here, but this new build ticks off a number of content items on our roadmap: the Cruiser UFO, both alien and human Fusion Weapons, the third interceptor aircraft and third dropship aircraft, plus the ARES (an upgraded hovering version of the MARS). We're currently hotfixing the game on a daily basis to remove crashes and AI hangs encountered by our community, and we'll be focusing on smoothing out the game balance once the worst of the bugs are dealt with. Unity 2022 - Load Times & Borderless Fullscreen: The biggest single task we've completed on over the past couple of months has been upgrading to Unity 2022, which Milestone 3 now runs on. This has been quite disruptive, but worthwhile - the update has enabled us to reduce load times by ~30% across all parts of the game, and we're hoping to further improve that to a ~50% reduction in the coming months. The game now also properly supports Borderless Fullscreen mode, allowing you to freely Alt-Tab without issues (something a LOT of people in the community had been requesting). Players should encounter fewer issues with multi-monitor setups than before too. The upgrade should also help speed up development somewhat. I won't bore you with the technical details, but code compiles much faster in 2022 relative to our older version and there's much more powerful debug tools available, so we'll collectively be spending a lot less time twiddling our thumbs while we wait to test our work. AI Upgrades: The other major task we've been working on is AI improvements. The AI now has access to more information about the battlefield around it, and it's making much more sensible decisions in combat about where to position its units and how to attack. However, we're still keeping a close eye on the AI because further tweaks or bugfixes may be required - even minor issues in the AI settings can cause AI units to do bizarre things in certain situations. But the good news is that these issues should now be easy to fix, and it's just a case of testing the game enough to find them all. Specific AI improvements have been also made to the civilians (who were famously suicidal in older builds) and for melee aliens like Reapers, which had been struggling to attack effectively. New Assets: As well as the new content I already mentioned has been added for Milestone 3, we've been adding lots of new maps to the game and have also added a significant number of new 3D models for various soldier weapons that had previously been using placeholders. The research art for the new research projects is also largely complete and should be finished by the 19th. We're also starting to work on updates that won't appear until Milestone 4. Kickstarter backers will remember pre-Early Access versions of the game contained the Andron alien race, but they were removed due to issues with their models and animations. The updated Androns have now been designed and are in the process of being modelled up so we can reintroduce them in future. This is part of a wider task to create additional variants of existing aliens. The Wraiths in particular don't have enough 3D model variants to represent their different ranks, so we've designed a more heavily armoured Wraith variant that will appear in the later UFOs, and also designed a proper uniform for the basic "civilian" Wraith you encounter acting as a pilot or engineer inside UFOs (currently they just appear naked). Conclusion: Overall, it's been a productive couple of months for the team despite the disruption of the Christmas holidays. The Unity 2022 upgrade and the AI upgrades were both large tasks so it's nice to have them done, and I think Milestone 3 is going to be another significant upgrade for the game - once testing has ironed out all the kinks. Thanks for reading, and please let us know if you encounter any bugs or issues when playing on the Experimental branch!

Having higher ground is one of the most basic advantages one can have in combat. As far as I know, it's not simulated in this game at all. As you can see in the (amazing) image below, the unit on the roof has 50% cover just by being higher, while at the same time having a 100% vision to the unit on the ground level. Being higher up should also reduce the amount of cover smaller props like rocks and fences provide on lower levels.

This is an update for the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches that contains all the fixes from versions 1.26 to 1.28 which have been tested on the Experimental build. The combined changelogs are shown below: Gameplay: Using shot preview move (Ctrl+Shift) no longer causes significant performance problems. Various smaller performance updates to both strategy and tactical layer (although these are unlikely to be noticable in an Experimental build due to the extra logging reducing overall performance) Added a "mission briefing" button to the Geoscape info panel for a tactical mission, which shows you the mission briefing on the strategy layer. Cleaner SMGs and Cleaner Accelerated Rifles are now recoverable and usable (by popular demand). The intro cinematic and the game mechanic popups are now enabled at the start of each campaign, regardless of whether the tutorial is enabled or not. Xenonaut Sentry Guns can now open doors, but are unable to crush objects. Reduced the spawn rate of Cleaner anomalies at the start of the game. Tooltips have been added for the various stat columns on the Soldier Recruitment panel. Snowmobiles should now explode when destroyed. Stalker Stealth Armour now displays as Gas Immune in Xenopedia. When hovering the cursor over the base icons in the top right, the base name is now displayed instantly rather than after a short delay. When hovering the cursor over a soldier in the vertical list on the dropship soldier arrangement screen, the popup showing their face / equipment is now show instantly rather than after a short delay. Key Fixes: Fixed a bug where the day 180 "Content Complete" popup was not being shown, and the game loss conditions were not triggering if you lost enough regions. Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to begin a crash site mission when there was a wreckage site also present on the Geoscape. Fixed a bug that could cause multiple popups to spawn when intercepting UFOs or sending a dropship to a tactical mission. In both cases this could cause crashes. Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur during the alien turn if the aliens were using hovering units like Servitors. Fixed two rare crashes that could occur in the Soldier Equip pool due to corrupted Kickstarter backer soldiers. Fixed a rare crash that could occur if you built over 50 planes. General Fixes: It's no longer possible to find undiscovered Cleaner Cells / Bases / etc by clicking on a UFO or mission that has spawned near to where they are hidden. Fixed grenades / aircraft missiles not properly upgrading if you skip the Alenium project and go straight for Fusion. Aircraft will now start to immediately repair Armour after being upgraded. Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly charging TU for you to pick an item up and then put it back in the same spot. Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly forgetting to charge TU if you moved the same item multiple times. TU costs for abilities are now rounded up rather than down. This fixed some odd situations where it was occasionally better to have fewer TU. It should no longer be possible to use a jetpack to fly between rooms in the Alien Base, or to jetpack through the roof of the Dragonfly dropship. Fixed an issue where it was not possible to redirect a dropship in flight to a landed UFO site. MARS vehicles now correctly display their names in the tactical combat. Disabled the day 300 Orbital Bombardment research report (which wasn't supposed to be in the game). Psyon VIP on Cleaner Cell missions no longer reports recovering both a Stunned Psyon and a Cleaner VIP if captured alive. Stalker Stealth Armour no longer shows the hair of soldiers floating inside their helmet. Dead Cyberdrones should no longer appear to be alive again after loading a save. Fixed some terrain objects in the Xenonaut base showing a bright pink error texture when destroyed. Fixed the Boreal sawmill building roofs so they correctly disappear if destroyed. Fixed typos in the strategy tutorial, Frag Grenade tooltip, and Ballistic Weapons and Fighter Datacore research text. Fixed the Engineering recruit panel having tooltips referring to scientists instead of engineers. Fixed a text overflow issue in the soldier memorial screen. Cleaner ballistic rifles no longer have an additional 5-round burst. Bomber UFO no longer incorrectly referred to as "medum-size" in Xenopedia. HEVY now displays its damage type as Thermal on tooltips. Tactical Inventory no longer incorrectly refers to the Tactical Vest as the Belt. Rush replace on aircraft now correctly costs the listed amount of money. Fixed an issue where you could drag any type of ammo onto any weapon on the Soldier Equip screen and it would accept it. MARS now correctly displays its name in the tactical combat. Fixed some Xenopedia / tooltip typos.

Closed Beta Build V26 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch (unless you're part of our Steam Playtest, in which case you don't have to change branches at all!) so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). This build basically combines another hotfix we had planned for V25.5 with the work we did on our recent Steam demo. The game balance hasn't changed massively but there's still been some major new additions. We'll be taking a better look at the game balance for V27, which is already being worked on. Note that this changelog also includes the changes made in the tutorial, as that wasn't an "official" build. Changelog: Tutorial: the game now has a proper tutorial, which will play if you have the Introduction checkbox set. This explains the basic mechanics and some of the events leading up to the start of the game, and we're pretty proud of it - it's not particularly long, but hopefully still does a decent job of showing players the key mechanics (it has had a few visual updates and bugfixes since the demo release too). Esc menu now works in the air combat. Interceptors can now be selected with hotkeys 1-3 in the air combat. Time speed in the air combat and on the Geoscape are now controlled with F1-F4. Added new artwork for the following research projects: Cleaner Operations, Alien Alloys, Alenium. Visually restyled following UI popups: Launch Aircraft panel Squadron Information UFO Intercepted Squadron Intercepted Air Combat Result Abort Mission confirmation popup in tactical combat Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur if you clicked a save game on the Load Game screen while it was still loading the list of saves. Fixed a crash that could occur when changing camera level during a tactical mission after an alien was killed. Fixed a crash that could occur after an alien unit used a grenade. Fixed a crash that could occur when you disabled a newly-constructed Lab. Fixed an AI hang that could occur if a local forces unit was Mesmerised by a Psyon. Fixed various alien abilities getting messed up after loading a save game. Fixed a bug preventing players from being able to pick up corpses / stunned units and put them in their inventory. Updated the Geoscape region borders to be neater and less pixelated, and updated the cities and base icons to look a little neater too. Camera no longer centers on the selected soldier at end of turn. Performance should be increased on the Soldier Equip screen. Bleeding wounds minitab icon in GC now has a tooltip associated with it. Updated the Cleaner Intel Hub mission briefing and objectives so it is hopefully more obvious you cannot win the mission through elimination of all enemies. Balance Changes: The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now has dynamic difficulty depending on when it is revealed. If researched in month 1, the Cleaners present are equipped with SMGs rather than Rifles and have no armour. In month 2 they get stronger, and they get stronger again once you enter month 3. Reduced the cost of building aircraft weapons. Crushing crushable objects now costs +1 TU. Slightly increased the range bonus on most weapons, so you get more +hit bonus as you get closer to the target. Stun Guns are now quite a bit more accurate within 6 tiles of the target, but less accurate beyond 6 tiles. 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.

This hotfix addresses several more issues discovered within V25. You'll need to be part of our Steam Playtest or on the Experimental Branch to access the build. This update does break saves so if you want to continue your V25.1b playthrough then please switch over to the Experimental Legacy branch (just called "Legacy" branch on Playtest). Just a quick note to say thanks to all the new testers who have given us their thoughts on the game and reported bugs, we've been able to make a lot of changes in the past couple of days with your help. Many of them are quite minor changes but the layers of polish really start to add up over time. This may be be our last major hotfix this year, as both of our programmers are now on their Christmas holidays and won't be returning until the start of January, although I'll still be working for a few days yet so I can continue to improve balance and fix any asset-related bugs (and to be honest that's most of them these days). But please continue to post up bugs and provide feeback so we know what we need to work on when we're back! Bugfixes: Fixed a crash if you tried to produce the Vehicle Gauss Weapons engineering project. Fixed newly constructed interceptors not being equipped with armour. Fixed an issue where alien abilities did not function after loading a tactical save (including causing the Wraith accuracy penalty to be permanently active). Fixed the player incorrectly getting a massive +hit bonus against the Sebillians as a result of their poor eyesight. Fixed Sectons being able to fire their weapons significantly beyond their usual range, which was causing 0 damage on hits due to damage dropoff. Balance / Gameplay Changes: Servitors no longer self-heal. Sentry Guns can no longer use the MARS Cannon or MARS Rocket weapons, and are now correctly limited to infantry LMGs. The first Observer UFO has been pushed back one UFO wave. The crew of Observers is now a mix of Soldiers with magnetic weapons, and Elites with plasma weapons (previously it was all Elites with plasmas, which was too much of a difficulty spike). The minimum sell price of items has been increased from 25% to 40% of their original price. Each recovered abduction tube now correctly grants 5 Alloys and 3 Alenium. Previously it gave one or the other. Wraiths no longer have grenades, as these appeared to be causing crashes. We'll fix this issue in the next major build and return the grenades afterwards. The range bonus on the MARS Cannon was far too high before, and it has now been reduced to be in line with other weapons. There's now a deployment region in the starting room of the Cleaner Base. Sentry Guns can no longer gain medals. The missiles in the hangars in the Xenonaut Base defence missions now explode on destruction. Interface / Visual Updates: There's some new art for the Cleaner Headquarters research project. Attempted to fix the Farm hedgerows being visually messed up. The Geoscape pop-up that provides information on ground combat missions now contains a line for "Mission Type" The Toogle Roof button in the tactical UI should no longer disappear when toggled on in some instances The Quickload key (F9) will now hire only the most recent Quicksave (F5) from the current campaign, rather than the most recent save from the current campaign. The scientists / engineer hire screens no longer automatically hire selected staff if you navigate away from the screen without pressing the Hire button. Fixed a number of incorrect tooltips, and added several new tooltips to the Engineering screen. Updated the tooltips / engineering project descriptions for various advanced soldier modules so it's a bit more obvious what they do Updated the research project descriptions for alien interrogations Updated cliffs so that their sides should not z-fight.

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!

Apologies for the delays to this update. Some big news this month - we're planning to launch the game into Early Access in February next year, and I've been underwater with preparations for that. We're also going to be putting out another tactical mission demo as part of a Steam event later this month, which is also eating into my time. I'll be writing a much longer post later this month explaining our plans for Early Access in detail, so I'll just focus this post on what work we did last month. Abduction Missions: The biggest feature we've been working on are Abduction Missions, which are a new type of tactical mission intended to provide a bit more variation to the ground combat. In these missions the aliens have captured a number of civilians and imprisoned them within teleporter pods, and you have a certain number of turns to free as many civilians as possible - once the timer runs out, all surviving aliens and any pods that have not been opened teleport away. You win the mission by rescuing at least 50% of the civilians, so these missions are no harder than a "normal" mission where you kill all the aliens. However, you receive a small amount of money resources for each opened pod and killed alien (as they do not teleport away) so the player can potentially obtain more rewards on these missions by playing more aggressively than normal. Personally I think this makes them an interesting change of pace from some of the other mission types. These were way more effort than I was expecting them to be, but they're basically done now (just ironing out a few bugs) and so should be included in V24. Grenades: We've now done the final part of the grenade implementation - setting them to use arcs, so they can be thrown over walls or intervening cover. This is surprisingly tricky from a design perspective (arcs and abstract 3d tile grids don't go together well) and even more of a pain to implement, but we know it's an important feature to a lot of players. We're just fixing up a few bugs and some issues with the visualisation, but this feature is also pretty much done and should be in V24. Achievements & Cloud Saves: Achivements are now complete, including artwork, and set up on Steam and GOG. You'll be able to earn them (well, most of them) starting in V24. I'll also shortly be turning on Steam cloud saves, but because our save games were previously absolutely enormous (up to 20mb for some tactical saves) we've spent some time optimising the files so they are much smaller. They should now only be about 20% of their previous size, so only a few mb each, and won't totally destroy anyone stiill on a metered connection. Terrain Tiles & Maps: Last month I spent a bunch time fixing all the problems with the UFOs in the game, using a new tool to find and fix all the line of sight "holes" which could cause the interior space to be revealed by soldiers who were still outside. I also fixed the non-walkable tiles that occasionally appeared inside the UFOs, and finished setting up the styling on the Harvester and Battleship UFO interior spaces. I've also added a LOT of new terrain tiles to the game. These will be most noticeable in the Xenonaut Base biome, which is now mostly complete and looks much more polished than it did in our last public release (there's just a few more rooms left to complete). This is also reflected in the Cleaner Base plot mission, which has been completely restyled and now looks much better than before. UI Updates: We're continuing to work towards having the strategy UI refresh complete for our Early Access launch in February. I've implemented the new visual style for the Main Base and Stores screens, and we're nearly done with designing the Soldiers screen. Once that is complete we only have the Research, Engineering, Aircraft and Soldier Equip screens to implement. Additionally, we're working on an updated visual style for the Geoscape map itself. This won't be dramatically different but we want a map that looks a bit more distinct from the one in the first Xenonauts, and is just a bit neater and less noisy. We're still at an early stage of this but I'm hoping it'll come out well! Campaign / Tech Tree: In preparation for V24 I'm doing another balancing pass on the campaign. One small thing we implemented here was the ability to randomise the spawn times of missions and UFO waves, which has helped make things less predictable, and in general I've just been working through the game and ensuring everything unlocks correctly so you can actually make it to the final mission. I'm looking to get the tech tree locked down for the Early Access release shortly, as there is still quite a bit of art and writing that needs to be added. However this month I did write all the research entries for the entire alien / Cleaner plot chain from the start of the game right up to Operation Endgame (this was about 15 entries in all). This means the hardest part of the writing is now done, as "normal" research entries are less narratively connected and much faster to write. I think that's everything. We are working on V24 still but I'm not going to give a firm date for when it'll be released as I'm conscious I've got the demo to sort out first. But hopefully in the next couple of weeks!

With June complete it is once again time for our monthly update. There’s three main things to talk about: accessibility, the end of the game, and the release of V24. Accessibility: We recently noticed that a lot of players were misunderstanding game mechanics, and given the people currently playing the game are Kickstarter backers who usually know the first game well this set some alarm bells ringing at our end. As a result we've added a lot more information to the game this month, which should help experienced players easily understand how the different mechanics are interacting and should (hopefully) make the game much less intimidating for new players. The first element of this is a "hit calculation" panel in the tactical combat, which explains exactly how the hit chance of a shot is calculated (see above). This is a relatively simple change that makes it much easier to understand the ground combat, as it previously wasn't always obvious what you could do to improve the hit chance of a shot. The second improvement is to the Xenopedia (research) reports, which now show the stats of the corresponding alien / UFO / aircraft / piece of equipment / etc. To make things even clearer, we've also added in a section for "abilities" that allows us to explain any unique properties - e.g. the basic Sebillian aliens have the "Regeneration: 20" and "Scaled Hide: 5" abilities and hovering over either of these displays a tooltip that explains exactly what those abilities do and how they work. The result is a clear summary of what each thing in the game does. Importantly, this does not require the player to read the wall of text that comes with each research report - although lots of players like reading the lore, I suspect there's also a lot who would rather not have to! As a final improvement here, we're also working on making the Xenopedia accessible in the tactical combat via the Esc menu! Next, we’ve added mission briefings at the start of tactical missions that make it clear what the objectives and any special rules / alternate win conditions are. Previously this wasn't required because almost every mission boiled down to "kill all the aliens" but now we've started adding more mission variety via more complex objectives it is definitely needed - we were finding a lot of people were getting confused on the non-standard missions. Lastly, we’ve re-enabled the loading screen tips and added quite a few new tips. These are surprisingly useful to communicate minor gameplay or usability features that even some experienced players are not aware of. What comes next on usability? The two main things we're currently planning out are the tutorial and little pop-up notifications that explain mechanics to players as they play (e.g. you can right-click on a door from an adjacent tile to open it, etc). I'm hopeful the game will be fairly easy to learn and play once those systems are done, given our tooltips are already in a reasonably good state! Operation Endgame: We've been working on the final mission of the game for a while now. Last month I blocked out the maps and we did the fundamental code required to support two missions back-to-back. This month I was doing proper gameplay testing on the mission which has led to a lot of bugs being fixed and quite a few amendments to the levels and the balancing. Anyway, it's now possible to unlock the final mission and win it. However, we want to make the experience of winning a game slightly more rewarding than it was in the first Xenonauts, where the game just flashed up a couple of lines of congratulatory text and then booted you back to the menu screen. We've been implementing a campaign stats panel to show the player (e.g. "Total Aliens Killed", "Total Soldiers Lost", etc) and I'm also planning a more substantial epilogue to the game too. Build V24 / Public Release: We're hoping to release our next closed beta version towards the end of this month, likely some point during the week commencing 18th July. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the things we're working on at the moment are some of the biggest things blocking an open beta / Early Access release (people need to be able to understand the game and win the campaign), and this is not entirely a coincidence. I'm not going to publicly announce any plans yet but we're making a concerted effort to get the game ready for sale soon. Perhaps we'll have some dates to announce next month. Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone - apologies for this update being a little late, I had a couple of things I wanted to finish up before I started telling everyone about them. The first thing to discuss is public builds, and the fact we haven't released one recently. We've been working on a couple of big systems that required a significant campaign rebalance once implemented, some systems that required UI updates, and we've also been working on the Cleaner missions that happen right at the start of the game. Anything we put out before that work was finished would have been almost unplayable. Hopefully the next public build will be coming in about two weeks - but with all these changes, I'm expecting it to need several iterations on the Experimental branch before it becomes a better gameplay experience than the most recent V22 build! The first big change we've been working on is the Armour system. For simplicity, we've now unified the armour system in the tactical combat and the air combat so Armour is a flat reduction on incoming damage (e.g. 30 damage hitting a target with 10 Armour does 20 damage). However, there's a wider variety of armour penetration and armour destruction on the various weapons in the tactical combat compared to the first Xenonauts, so the player is now presented with more decisions about the best order to use their attacks. We've added a new grenade that inflicts limited damage on units but is excellent at removing terrain and shredding armour, and we'll be experimenting with armour-piercing ammo for ballistic / Gauss weapons this month too. These armour mechanics have also been applied to the Air Combat, along with quite a few other changes. I've done another balancing pass on the air combat because Xenonauts 2 has added a new type of weapon to the air combat - the energy lance (alongside cannons, missiles and torpedoes). Previously this weapon type lacked any real individual identity and part of the rationale for the armour changes was to give all four types of weapon their own niche: Cannons are short-range, high DPS (damage per second) weapons with 40 ammo. They do low damage per shot so armour reduces their damage significantly, but they also shred armour relatively quickly. Cannons will kill most things but require you to get in close and stay there, which can be very dangerous against UFOs with powerful weapons. Missiles are long range and high damage weapons, but only have 4 ammo. They do excellent burst damage so are great at destroying unarmoured UFOs (e.g. Fighter UFOs) before they can attack you, and can also quickly kill other types of UFO if another weapon is used to strip the armour off them first. Torpedoes are long range weapons with excellent armour destruction, but only have 2 ammo and are slow and easily avoided by agile UFOs. Hitting an armoured UFO with torpedos will quickly strip away its armour and leave it vulnerable to other types of weapon. Energy lances are medium range weapons with medium DPS and good armour destruction, and 15 shots. They act somewhat like torpedoes, but trade a shorter range and a slower rate of fire for more ammunition, more versatility, and the ability to hit agile UFOs. In addition to this, there's been two other major changes to the air combat. Firstly, there is now a "deployment phase" at the start of the air combat where you can set your interceptors up anywhere around the edge of the map, allowing you to group them together or split them and approach the UFO from multiple sides. The type of tactics you want to use are likely to vary based on the type of UFO and the fire arcs of its weapons (and whether it has weapons capable of attacking multiple interceptors at once). You don't get to deploy freely if UFOs on an air superiority mission attack you, however! Secondly, I've reverted the change where interceptors are always built in squadrons of three. We're back to the original system where aircraft are built individually, and our new approach to balancing the air combat is that UFOs gain some additional HP and Armour for each additional interceptor taking part in the battle. It's still advantageous to send more interceptors into battle against a UFO, but this just gives the player more flexibility in their approach - a single well-equipped advanced interceptor can often now be just as effective as a full squadron of three more primitive interceptors (the latter was almost always better in X1). The convenient lore explanation for this is larger squadrons are more easily detected as they approach the UFO, giving it more time to power up its emergency shielding and prepare for combat. I'm aware this doesn't 100% make sense, but I think the gameplay benefits are worth it. The other significant new mechanic has been the introduction of the morale system in the tactical combat. This a similar system to the first Xenonauts but has a few improvements to make it easier to understand and interact with, and hopefully to make the alien psionic abilities feel less random. There's also now a "Focus Mind" button that allows a soldier to spend TU in order to boost their morale, which gives the player a way to defend themselves against potential morale events or psionic attacks if they want. The problem here is that our current tactical UI design has been straining under the weight of all the new mechanics and UI elements we've added since we implemented it 2-3 years ago, and having to add Armour / Morale bars and this new Focus Mind button has been the final straw. We've therefore been working on the final tactical combat UI design that brings the visuals up to final quality and properly integrates all the new stuff. This is a massive job because it's one of the most important and complex UI elements in the game, but I think we've found a layout that works well - it displays more information than the current UI does and uses less space to do it! This post is getting really long now, so I'll just mention a few more things in passing - the Cleaner missions at the start of the game are now a pre-set sequence of four missions with some unique mission objectives to mix things up a bit (as opposed to randomly generated missions that filled a meter that eventually revealed the Cleaner base) a few more screens have had a UI facelift, a few more 3d civilian models and alien armour models have been created and are waiting to be rigged, and we've created some stone ruins to add a bit of variety to our jungle maps - and I'll just leave all the smaller things out entirely. So we've been busy, and we're working on a lot of big things. Apologies for the lack of public builds but when the next one eventually arrives, I think you'll all be impressed by the progress!

As November draws to a close it's once again time for our monthly update. This month we've mostly been working on turning the experimental builds of V22 into something ready to be released on our main Steam / GOG branches. This has involved a total of 6 hotfixes, which might be a record for us! Anyway, V22 is now out. This is the first major update on our main branches since March (sorry!) and I think anyone who hasn't been playing on the Experimental branches is in for quite a treat given how much the game has changed since then. The reception to the V22 Experimental builds overall has been very positive, both in terms of comments and the pattern of play that we're seeing from users. Part of the reason that we released so many hotfixes for V22 was that many of our testers have been playing much further through their campaigns than previously, so they're encountering bugs in areas of the game towards the end that haven't yet been tested (or balanced) properly. A couple of the late-game UFOs had broken teleporters that meant you couldn't actually complete those missions, for example. It's very encouraging to see that people are already able to spend 5+ hours playing a campaign, when we as developers know we've still got a lot of improvements left to make. There haven't been too many new features added this month. The coders have been busy fixing bugs and I was off for a couple of weeks on paternity leave, so there's not been too much time. Nonetheless a few pieces of new content have arrived - a couple more research projects have been written up, some new terrain tiles have been added and more destruction states set up on existing tiles, various corpse art for the aliens has been done, and a little bit of new UI art has arrived. We've done quite a bit of work on 3D characters this month too. Now the Xenonaut models are complete, we're working on the final high-quality 3D models for the local civilians in each map. This is quite a big job as there's probably about 30 different clothing items that need to be modelled and combined in different ways to give us all the variants we need to have realistic-looking locals across the many different biomes in our game, but the progress so far is looking good. We're also starting to work on the rank / armour variants for various aliens, which we want to look a little more distinctive than they did in Xenonauts 1. We've now finished the Psyons and will be moving onto the Sebillians next. The one new code feature we spent some time on this month was trying to make controlling multiple soldiers easier in the tactical combat. We've done this by setting up Spacebar to accelerate unit movement - pressing Space while a unit is moving causes them to finish their move pretty much instanteously. Pressing Space when a unit isn't moving causes the game to mark that soldier as having finished their turn and automatically select the next nearest soldier that hasn't finished their turn (of course, you can re-select "finished" soldiers manually if you want). Once all the soldiers have been marked as finished, Space will end the turn. You can now play through a turn relatively quickly if you want, which can often be useful towards the end of a mission. That's pretty much it from me. With December including the Christmas holidays we'll be having another truncated month but with V22 done I'm hoping we can get some cool new features in for you guys to test in January!

Hello everyone - with August now finished it's time for me to write the monthly update. I know it's been a long time since our last release but we've been hard at work on Closed Beta V21 and we're planning to release it this week (hopefully in the next few days). The biggest new feature in V21 is that we've implemented the final visual style for the Main Menu / Game Settings screen, and all the related sub-panels (Settings, Load Game, Save Game, etc). We've been working on this new UI style for quite some time now, and it's nice to finally be able to put it in the game - but there's also been a lot of time an effort spent on improving the usability and general polish of the screen too. This includes everything from adding support for mass-deletion of save games to adding new UI sounds. Overall, it's a much more slick and stylish experience and it should make a much better first impression when you first boot up the game. We'll continue to roll this new UI style out to other parts of the game as development continues. We've also worked on a number of things that haven't really made it into V21, but will be arriving in V22. We've updated the early game so the war against the aliens starts a couple of months into the game, and you begin the game fighting the infiltrator faction called the Cleaners who are intent on suppressing knowledge of the alien invasion. Because the Cleaners are spread across the planet and have numerical superiority over the Xenonauts, this allows us to have mission objectives that don't make sense when you are fighting the aliens. For example, wave survival maps, VIP escort / assassination missions, extraction missions, objective capture, etc. Some of these should arrive in V22 and make the early game a bit more varied and exciting! More work has also been done on the visual side of things. The updated Xenonaut models aren't quite ready to go in the game yet but should be fine for V22, and we're now working on modelling up a series of hairstyles for them so your units are more varied and easily recognisable. Work also continues on the tactical combat environments. The final visual pass on the Western Town tiles is now mostly complete (one of the biggest environments due to the number of different buildings in it) and we'll put them in V22, after which we'll move onto some of the other environments that need some visual upgrades. There's also been some work on wall destructibility, as once a tile is visually finished we can do the final destructibility setup on it and then put it in the game as a finished asset. The wall "frill" system is designed to ensure destroyed walls have a natural-looking irregular edge (rather than the perfectly straight-edged hole you get if you just remove the wall). However, we also don't want these "frills" floating in the air if there's no adjacent wall for them to attach to, so we needed to do some work detecting whether there was a suitable wall on either side and only placing the frills if so. Anyway, the important thing is that our destruction system should now be finished, which allows us to start doing the final destruction states on all of our finished assets. We also implemented a couple of smaller tasks this month too - difficulty settings are now complete, and there's a number of options we have to customise difficulty. However I've not done this yet because I've not balanced the full campaign yet and I think tweaking difficulty levels needs to be done once I'm happy with the "standard" difficulty. The other new system is directional sound, which is intended mostly to allow us to play sounds when certain things are on screen (fire noises, the noise of engines running on vehicles, etc). Again, this is just useful for making the game feel a bit more alive. Finally, we've made a start on the soldier dialogue / barks system. This is a simple system that generates (non-interactive) text dialogue from your soldiers based on things that happen on the battlefield. As a basic example, a soldier might say "I'm hit!" if they are shot by an alien. We're hoping to implement that in its basic form next month with some test dialogue to see if it's a good addition to the game (there's potential for it to be annoying if we get it wrong), and we'll spend some time making it as varied and natural as possible. I'm hopeful that this system is going to make the combat feel a lot more reactive to your actions, but we won't know for certain until we've had a chance to test it! That's probably enough for this update now, as I need to get back to work on V21. Thanks for reading!

From what I gather, there's been a lot of talk about how armour should be handled in the game. Whether it should be ablative (HP), whether it should work like a spring (% damage reduction), or whether it should work like armour. A scifi setting can justify ablative armour, or DUNE like armour that increases defence according to the level of the threat. But when you're talking about human armour, you're talking about level III kevlar vests using level IV ceramic inserts. It makes sense for human armour to be well within our understanding and seem plausible. Otherwise, what makes the alien scifi armour special, if you start with inertial dampeners or pseudo-magical armour? % Based Armour The issue with % based armours is they feel downright magical, and that any improvement in armour has massive effect, and yet is pretty darn pointless and useless at lower levels. If you have 100 HP and a 5% reduction to damage (we'll ignore types for now), there is very little it can do for you. Any hit above 105 damage will incapacitate you. If damage averages high relative to your health, those 5 points don't make a difference. And if damage averaged even as low as 1 HP of damage, it just means it will take 105 hits to kill you, instead of 100 hits. Meanwhile, if you make it 80%, boy does it look weird. A pistol that inflicts a maximum of 60 damage now only does 12, shaving off 38 points, but still taking off more than a tenth of your health. A .50 cal rifle of 500 max damage is reduced to 100, shaving off 400 points. So, with any damage variance, you can quite easily survive a shot from an anti material rifle, yet can be killed by 9 pistol shots. Balancing % based armour is also really annoying, and it's the same work as balancing straight-damage armour. Ablative Armour Chris covered one of the points against this in the past, HP-based armour. Skilled players make good use of cover, so rarely get shot. Ablative armour is also basically a free hit, which allows you to perform suicidal tactics. If you know you can take three hits before dying, then you might as well act like a maniac until you get hit at least once. You can then rotate other troops in with full armour, until everyone has had a turn playing Rambo. This might be interesting for an action game, but for a tactics game it's just a droll sort of meta game strategy which makes you feel totally secure while fighting 'horrifying' aliens. It also has the issue of turning everyone into MMORPG style bullet sponges, as the game progresses. If you have an armour upgrade, of course it will give you more HP. Whereas before gunfire might've been dangerous and intimidating, it becomes laughable. The suicidal tactics I mentioned become the obvious strategy, as there's no reason to fear Reaction Fire as you rush through the open. To get things back on track, you add in guns with massively more damage, fixing the armour and undoing what it did. Soon, you all wear increasingly bigger pauldrons and use sillier looking axes, until you look like this. The weapons at the start of the game become toys, and you enter an epic league beyond human interest. Balancing ablative armour isn't really hard, it is just pointless. It's great for padding out recent games by turning them into mind-numbingly boring RPGs, that sell XP boosters so you can get them over with faster. Real Armour Real armour has some of the qualities of the above. Like the Ablative, you can try to tank some hits, and play things more riskily. And it is risky, Since like % armour it is possible to be killed by enough pistol shots, so long as one of them goes through your visor. You can't ignore tactics, you still want to use cover and avoid fire, in case your armour fails you. Yet you still get that feeling of power, from wearing armour that lets you shrug off attacks that would surely kill your unarmoured allies. Still, you never shake the feeling of dread, of when an enemy sends a plasma bolt your way. There's not a lot to say about genuine armour... because there isn't anything wrong with it. Straight-damage armour serves its purpose, and it does it well; even if it does it without the fanfare and flashy numbers of modern games. Balancing this isn't as easy as Ablative armour, where you can just pick whatever numbers you feel like, but it is straight forward. Armour is built to withstand certain levels of gunfire, and weapons are designed to pierce that armour, each piece of equipment has its class and its uses in the tactical meta. Additional details: Below are some additional ideas and details for the handling of armour.

You're saying this as if an improved Xenonauts is a bad thing and it has to be something completely different.

I have to say this shows why Goldhawk is an amazing studio. There's a real willingness to try new ideas, but without necessarily committing to them - you can admit when something simply doesn't work. And offering refunds to people who specifically wanted now-changed features is very admirable and honest. On the gameplay front, while I liked the bold ideas behind the "shadow war" on the Geoscape and all that, I'm also really pleased with where the game is headed now. X1 is one of my favourite games, and I'm definitely in the camp that will be pretty happy with an improved X1. While the strategy layer is currently an almost exact copy of X1, I'm very happy about the improved tactical layer. There's a bunch of really small improvements but it adds up, and the boxy destructible UFOs are my favourite feature.

We're probably overdue another development update, so here's a quick post letting everyone know what we've been working on recently. Quite a bit to talk about actually! Firstly, a public service announcement - we're going to be ending the Xsolla pre-orders on our site on August 29th. Anyone who has an Xsolla pre-order at that point will then be sent an email asking their preference for a Steam key or a GOG key, which will be sent to them at the end of September (non-responders get a Steam key). We're doing this partially because Xsolla is proving a pain to maintain relative to Steam / GOG, and partially because we want to build up a backlog of interested customers prior to our Early Access launch. We're still not completely sure when Early Access is going to happen. The game is continuing to progress but I'm sure most of our beta testers would agree the game isn't ready for primetime yet; we're just going to keep adding things and fixing things until it is. The first thing we're working on right now is implementing the remaining missing or broken parts of the game - e.g. night missions, base defence missions, multiple dropship support, updgradeable dropships, further expansion of the air combat, etc. Switching back to the classic X1 base mechanics has been quite a bit of work but the job is largely done, we're now just at the stage where we're updating the other systems that have changed as a result of this - e.g. we've had to update the Aircraft systems now they are stationed in actual bases and need to appear in Hangar base buildings, and need to support construction to them and relocation between them. The second thing we're working on is overall usability and game balance. Over the past month or so we've been regularly talking about balance issues with the community and making adjustments, but we've also been fixing various gameplay bugs and design issues (such as suppression not functioning correctly, TU values being flat rather than %s, etc). We've nearly finished the tooltip system, too, which should make the game far easier to understand than it currently is ... right now there's not even a way to view the stats of a piece of equipment! Finally, we're also spending a bit of time looking at the visuals of the game. In the ground combat we've switched to genuine isometic / orthographic camera rather than a perspective one trying to mimic it, which makes the battlefield a bit easier to read. On the strategy layer I'm looking at doing a pass on the UI to clean it up a bit, removing a bit of the visual clutter and probably moving to a visually similar but more modern font that renders more cleanly (and supports lowercase letters and special characters). The visuals of the game are a lower priority right now than finishing off the game mechanics, but the issue is on our radar and we are slowly improving things. So, where does that leave us? I'm not exactly sure when Closed Beta V7 wil be due, as we first need to work through all the bugs / changes forced by the base update. I've also got another quite significant upgrade planned for the air combat that shifts the combat from a 1D grid to a 2D gride with "proper" movement. I'm guessing V7 is likely to arrive towards the end of this month, so we may release a (highly) experimental build in the interim that has a semi-broken strategy layer but will let us test some of the updated ground combat mechanics / balance changes. Anyway, thanks for reading - we'll keep you guys informed about our plans as they progress!

By the end of this month everyone who backed the Xenonauts-2 Kickstarter will have their Steam / GOG keys and going exclusive with Epic wouldn't involve taking them away, so using that logic I'm assuming you wouldn't actually mind us signing an Epic exclusive deal? Everyone would have got what they paid for and no promises to backers would have been broken ... but in reality I think there'd still be a big backlash if we did so. I personally find the whole Epic Store debate quite interesting. In principle I like the idea of Steam having more competition, because whilst overall they've been a huge boon to independent developers, they represent about 90% of our sales and yet our only contact with them is one guy who probably replies to our emails less than half the time. Having a competitor to keep them on their toes and make them more responsive to what users and devs want from them can only be a good thing - but then having games be exclusive to just one platform is kinda annoying as a consumer (although Battle.net / Origin / UPlay / whatever have been doing that for a long time so it's hardly a new phenomenon). Anyway, I suspect Snapshot were offered more than enough money to make the backlash they are facing worthwhile. I think it's a very dangerous thing to break promises to your backers and I can certainly see why people are angry, but everyone has their price and if there was enough money on the table then I could also see how that would be tempting for the dev team.

I don't think we'd be given the chance to have that kind of deal, even if we wanted it - we're not as sexy a game as Phoenix Point, who have already signed a lot of deals with various parties for a lot more money than we have. So I doubt there's any risk of us ever becoming an Epic exclusive!

Hello everyone - hope you all had a good Easter! It's time for our monthly update on the progress we've made on Xenonauts 2. Milestone 3 Patches: A lot of our time has been spent fixing bugs in Milestone 3 recently, with five patches being released in the last month. Many of these issues were minor problems caused by our Unity 2022 upgrade, but there's also been fixes for various older bugs and some improvements made to the foreign language translations of the game too. These updates should have collectively improved player experience quite a bit. One highlight was finally finding a fix for a long-standing bug that turned the screen black whenever any unit fired a weapon. This bug only affected a small number of users and there was a workaround (disabling the "camera shake" setting), but it made the game basically unplayable for anyone who did not know that - so it's definitely a relief to have it fixed! New Maps & Environments: We've also been hard at work on the content for Milestone 4, and the new maps needed for the largest UFO crash sites are the biggest component of this. These are progressing well - we're aiming to have 3 large maps per biome when Milestone 4 comes out, and we're about 80% of the way there now. In addition to this, the update will also contain numerous new Alien Base maps that were made the previous month. Furthermore, a new environment artist contractor has joined the team to help us improve our existing environments and eventually finish off the Soviet Town biome that we plan to add to the game before final release. We've already updated the command room in the ATLAS Base map so it more closely resembles what we have in our artwork (with a command table and proper wall screens), and now we're working on some underground earth textures for use in the Alien Base maps. I'm planning on using these to address one of the gameplay issues with the Alien Base maps - that all the walls are indestructible (even the ones between rooms). Under this new setup all walls will be destructible, so it'll be possible to destroy both internal walls and the external ones around the edge of rooms. Doing this will reveal the earth tiles behind the walls, and these themselves will also be destructible. This should allow more realistic gameplay where powerful weapons and explosives will be able to gouge holes in the walls, and theoretically it would also allow players to dynamically "mine" through the earth and breach other rooms if they sufficiently powerful weapons. Be aware this idea is still at the testing phase so I can't promise it will definitely work as planned... but all our testing so far looks good! Alien Visual & Audio Improvements: Our updated Androns have now been finished and will be marching into battle against humanity in Milestone 4. We've also retextured the basic Sectons, as these are the first aliens that new players encounter but previously had fairly basic textures. We're currently retexturing the Wraiths so their basic non-combatants have a simple military uniform rather than being completely naked, and this month we'll be creating an additional Wraith variant with heavier armour that will appear towards the end of the game. We're also in the process of hiring a contract audio engineer to improve the game's sound design in general, which will include creating some new sounds for the aliens to try and give them a bit more character (like new injury / death sounds, or unique footsteps etc). Smaller Improvements: We've also completed several small features this month that were requested by the community. Firstly, the dropship screen (where you can position your soldiers within the dropship) now shows the soldier role icons on the green soldier tiles, making the process much more straightforward than it was previously. Secondly, we've finally got "destruction linking" working properly, which allows us to have walkable tiles placed on top of large multi-tile objects like shipping containers and have them remove themselves if the underlying object is destroyed. This means there's now a lot more objects in the game that allow you to land on top of them and walk around (shipping containers, caravans, buses, certain fuel tanks, etc), and fewer cases of aliens mysteriously standing in mid-air on invisible tiles. Work was also done on the end of turn camera, which now better shows regeneration healing and Bleeding Wounds damage on any visible units at end of turn. We also rewitten the item assignment logic that occurs after a completed mission, because players were getting some strange loadout problems when running a second mission with the same dropship (some weapons not starting with a clip loaded, etc), which was just down to the primitive way in which the game assigned items to your soldiers if there wasn't enough to equip the whole squad. Finally, a surprisingly popular request was an upgrade for the basic Combat Knife weapon that is available for your soldiers, so we've designed an upgraded Energy Knife that will unlock off Alien Electronics and should allow the weapon to remain relevant for much longer. Conclusion: That's everything for this month - lots of smaller tasks that together represent good progress on the project. Hopefully we'll have an early version of Milestone 4 out for testing on the Experimental branch later this month!

I'm not a person who often talks polticics and I'm pretty neutral on many subjects, but this is not about money or about paying for anyone's defence. It's about standing beside the weaker and against the bully. It's about a world order where being bigger, wealthier and stronger is no reason to invade a smaller, poorer and weaker. It's about the priviledged always supporting the disadvantaged in every area of life - no matter how big or small the cause. I personally do it, and IMO everybody should. Turning your back when you see something bad happening is not the way to make this planet a better place. If I was homeless, hungry or poor, I would hope people gave me shelter, food or money If I was bullied in school, I would hope teachers or older students stood against the bullies. And if my country was attacked by a criminal terrorist country, I sure as hell would hope all friendy, civilized nations around the world rushed to help.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This contains a few additional fixes for 1.27 before it (hopefully) goes out on the main branch. Gameplay Changes: Fixed all types of ammo appearing under the "Equipment" tab of the soldier equip screen. It's no longer possible to find undiscovered Cleaner Cells / Bases / etc by clicking on a UFO or mission that has spawned near to where they are hidden. Added a "mission briefing" button to the Geoscape info panel for a tactical mission, which shows you the mission briefing on the strategy layer. Tooltips have been added for the various stat columns on the Soldier Recruitment panel. Fixed an issue where it was not possible to redirect a dropship in flight to a landed UFO site. Snowmobiles should now correctly explode when destroyed. Cleaner ballistic rifles no longer have an additional 5-round burst. Tactical Inventory no longer incorrectly refers to the Tactical Vest as the Belt. Stalker Stealth Armour now displays as Gas Immune in Xenopedia. Bomber UFO no longer incorrectly referred to as "medum-size" in Xenopedia. HEVY now displays its damage type as Thermal. When hovering the cursor over the base icons in the top right, the base name is now displayed instantly rather than after a short delay. When hovering the cursor over a soldier in the vertical list on the dropship soldier arrangement screen, the popup showing their face / equipment is now show instantly rather than after a short delay. Fixed a text overflow issue in the soldier memorial screen.

Yes the point blank aiming calculation could do with some work, standing next to the target with a shotgun and getting ~80% chance is just BS when in reality you couldn't miss without divine intervention... overall the current 45 degree misses etc. are kinda off putting and could be solved with a bit more refinement on the aiming calculations. And yes I also agree that kneeling down should increase accuracy, I also found it very strange that the only use for it is for cover, or in special case you can shoot over a crouched dude if the shooter is behind him and standing. Regarding that I'd like to add that not being able to shoot past teammates in adjacent squares freely regardless of stance seems kinda dumb. The squares are 1x1m or so at least, the soldiers have training, they should tell the teammate to get down etc. and not shoot before it's clear. No instead in this game they'll fire the whole burst straight at the back of the teammate standing next to them "you were in the line of fire" and not hit anything that was aimed at, after which the shot in the back character gets suppressed and kneels down out of the way.

Where the hell did you come from and took a shit out in the open here about who can say what? Some of us liked the 3x3 vehicles back in X1, what's wrong with that?

Hello! First and foremost - thank you for creating Xenonauts 1! When I first saw the screenshots my reaction was "oh my goodness, it's xcom but with ja2-level graphics! I got so tired of 90s 480px resolutions and bitmap fonts so I was so happy :)" Background: games I've played - ufo, tftd, ja2, wh40k chaos gate, new xcom, xenonauts 1, fallout 1 & 2 Ideas (I'm going to put some prefixes where's the main origin from idea): (JA2) ability to move while crouched, without standing up - IIRC the cost in JA2 was 150% of normal walking (JA2) ability to go into prone position and to crawl (JA2) when prone giving even larger accurancy bonuses / removing strength maluses from heavy weapons (TFTD / CG / JA2) melee lethal weapons - at least two kinds - machete/heavy drill for high TU cost->high damage; knife/smaller drill for low TU cost->low damage (JA2) ballistic weapon addons - tripods make sniper riles & MGs be more accurate when prone, but even more unwieldy (using more TUs) when not prone (CG) radiation grenades - hard radiation makes beings in 3x3 tile area take damage; radiation does not disappear - so think twice before nuking the only passageway (or maybe only cause little damage when passing, but larger when you end turn in one) (JA2) ability to have agent get into flat roof of a low-level building without powered systems (JA2 / CG) ability for "continued fire" for rifles - the model in JA2 (and in CG with Heavy Bolter) was that first shot costed more, as you'd draw the rifle and then press the trigger; drawing costed ~15% of TUs (like 3AP?), and firing ~50% (let's say 10AP?), but the following shots at the same target / target close not needing rotation of agent would cost only 10AP (the rifle would have been close to your face). So TLDR: first shot more expensive, more shots into the same area less expensive, as you keep doing the same stuff. (generic, configurability) faster turns, ability to turn off viewing "locals" (sometimes my turns in X1 are 0s of watching aliens that are hidden and 20s of locals crawling, running around - waste of real-life time) (generic, usability) when I lose vision of enemy during my turn, do not remove enemy's icon, but grey it out - otherwise it's putting strain on player's brain that should have been "please remember that this tile was observed to contain an alien" (I'm talking about a situation when in X1 you see alien, then turn around - there's nothing pointing out that enemy is still there what I consider confusing) (generic, personal preference) agent's field of vision configurable or disablable - let's say there are reasons I love sentinel armor :( (generic, personal preference) no hard time limit in the game / ability for infinite game if you manage to do so (i.e. to be so successful like in UFO/TFTD/X1) so that we can keep shooting down aliens and shooting the ground missions without being hurried to finish the game (this is contrary to the "mothership destroying LA" idea that's visible on this forum) Thank you for your work again! Would love to see X2 as even-better X1 with more stuff, just like JA2 was to JA1, or TFTD to UFO. So fingers crossed!

Actually this was the one part that I hope would change with Xenonauts 2. The dynamic of the Cold War was something woefully underused in the first game and I hope would be more emphasized. The whole MIB aspect could lend to a multitude of ways to deal with civilians on a map like just non lethally taking them down so that they wouldn’t run around like headless chickens and get turned into zombies by the Reapers or standing in the middle of a firefight blocking your shots. Not to mention the tech sharing possibilities. Maybe each bloc of the Cold War can offer different pros and cons for you to choose a side to tech share so that the war against the aliens will not only change the fate of humanity but the course of the Cold War as well. For instance gaining the favor of the Soviet Union by ruining a coup perpetrated by the US with some help of the aliens in exchange for a missile scientist. Or stealing cargo from a GDR convoy for the FDR to gain a some funds and a communications scientist. This will force the player to either play a game of tight rope balancing the power of two sides to avoid nuclear Armageddon or go all out to support one faction to eventually create a united world against the aliens. At the end there could be three different outcome. 1. You help the capitalist side win and collapse the Warsaw Pact 2. You help the communist win and establish a world government 3. You prolong the Cold War further into space

Closed Beta Build V12 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 build expands on the new MARS vehicle, and formalises the Orbital Bombardment and Signal Uplink mechanics we added in the last build into proper systems. Annoyingly, several new bits of content were close to being complete but didn't quite make it into the build - aerial terror sites, the new armour / penetration mechanics, and a new early-game escort UFO. Instead, they'll be coming in the next build. After this release and the various hotfixes we'll need to put out for it, we're going to take a bit of time to fix some backend stuff that's been causing us problems for a while, and perhaps also add the final Geoscape mechanics still required before we can call the Geoscape feature complete. This is quite a bit of stuff to get through, so it might be a month or so until the next update - but I think it's going to be a cool one, as there's also some new art incoming too. More about that in a proper developer update though! Key Changes: Relations becomes Panic: to make things easier to understand, each region now has a Panic score instead of a Relations score. This changes very little except a region is lost when Panic reaches 100, so any effects that reduced Relations (e.g. Orbital Bombardment and UFO activity) now increase Panic instead. Orbital Bombardment Notification: you now get a notification when the aliens destroy a city from orbit. Setting this system up also involved adding cities to the Geoscape and giving them all a population (and priority score for how likely the aliens are to blow them up). Signal Uplinks: these are now proper Geoscape objects rather than hacked-together Strategic Operations. You no longer need to assign a soldier to them to complete the mission, and the costs and effects are shown more clearly. You have an Uplink Capacity which controls how many uplinks you can have operational at once; there is a new base building called the Comms Room which increases this. In the next major build aliens will be able to attack and destroy these signal uplinks, so it's a bad idea to construct them in areas that your interceptors cannot cover! MARS / ARES tech tree: the MARS support vehicle we added in V11 has undergone some changes and now has a tech tree associated with it. Note that most of these changes are experimental so they're not yet reflected in the artwork of the game - it's all still pretty placeholder! The ARES becomes available in the mid-game. This is a small hovertank (currently represented by the X1 Hyperion) that is slightly less tough than the MARS, but has better Accuracy and more TUs. The MARS and ARES now recieve armour upgrades whenever your aircraft get armour upgrades, meaning they get tougher as the game goes on. Both the MARS and ARES have an optional armour module that fits extra armour plating, boosting their HP but reducing their TU (this is independent from the researchable armour upgrades). You can therefore choose whether you want your vehicle to act more like a scout or a tank. Vehicles now have a Primary and a Secondary slot, but no Belt. Vehicles can no longer equip infantry weapons, and must choose a Primary and Secondary from the following list: Primary: HMG: this is a stronger version of the infantry LMG. Cannon: a powerful weapon with a small blast area and decent ammo capacity. Rocket Launcher: fires powerful rockets with a large blast area, but has limited ammo capacity. Secondary: SMG: this is a 100-round version of the infantry SMG, designed to be a backup weapon if the primary runs out of ammo or is inappropriate for the situation. Smoke Launcher: this is a 4-shot grenade launcher that can only fire defensive smoke rounds. Rangefinder: this is not a weapon that can be used in combat, but it boosts the Accuracy of the vehicle by +10. You are now limited to one vehicle in the starting dropship, and the advanced dropship can carry two. Strategy: Bases now have a "radar tracking" value, which is larger than the "radar detection" value. What this means is that a detected UFO can be tracked for some distance beyond detection range, preventing the detection alert spam that could occur when a UFO was flying in and out of a base's detection range. You can now get your hands on the Tactical Visor armour module by completing the Alien Electronics research. Added proper map co-ordinates to the bottom right of the Geoscape screen. The "pop-up" text on the Geoscape (e.g. region names, "construct new base" text, etc) now appears in a set location at the bottom of the map. The cost of building a new base is now displayed when the construct new base mode is active. Tooltips can no longer get stuck to your mouse cursor. Repeatedly clicking the Funding Report button no longer queues up lots of copies of the same pop-up panel. Exosuit now has some armour modules, although there's no art for them yet because we're still painting up the final Exosuit design. Kickstarter soldiers should now be fully set up and any soldier generated by the game has a 10% chance of being picked from the custom soldier pool. Soldier hair should now work properly with helmets (this turned out to be a lot more work than you'd expect!) The names of save games should be slightly easier to read now, and ground combat save files now print the turn number in their file name. There's been quite a few performance improvements on the strategy layer. The Exosuit now boosts your soldiers TU by 12. Equipping the heavy variant removes this bonus, but provides extra armour and boosts your soldiers' Strength to 100 instead. Countries now start at 20 or 30 Panic, rather than at 50. Ground Combat: The MARS should now be able to crush vaultable objects; previously the vault logic was taking precedence (and as vehicles can't vault, it was preventing the MARS from driving through fences). In an alien base, if you clear the Command Room of aliens and have one of your own units present, all remaining aliens on the map will be revealed at the end of the turn. As always, please let us know if you encounter any issues with the build by posting in our bug reporting sub-forums and we'll do our best to patch the issues out!

Hello everyone - we've just gone into June and there's not been much news coming out of Goldhawk HQ recently, so I thought I'd write a quick forum update to keep everyone informed about our progress. We released our last update just over two weeks ago, which was a big hotfix for Closed Beta V5 and fixed quite a few of the stability issues we had in V5. Since then we've moved back to adding content and features to the game. We've already finished up a few features that will be in the next update such as the Crash Site airstrike mechanic that was in the original Xenonauts, the recovery of strategic items from specific ground combat tiles (e.g. a UFO Power Core grants you Alenium unless you destroy it), and the soldier management system that means you can no longer assign soldiers to multiple tasks that should be mutually exclusive (being in an airborne dropship, being on a Strategic Operation, being wounded, etc.) However, we're also starting work on some bigger tasks. We're updating the Air Combat to make it deeper but at the same time less fiddly - we're doing this by adding some new mechanics, but automating a lot of the clicking the current air combat requires you to do. Although you can pause the combat and issue your interceptors detailed manual orders if you choose, the new model of the air combat will automatically play itself out in the same way that the air combat in the original Xenonauts did. However, as the combat is now turn-based there's less reliance on split-second timing on your pauses. Anyway, I'll explain all the changes in more detail when the next major update arrives! As you can see from the example above, we're also working on adding new art to the game. In recent months we've brought on some new freelancers to start painting up the final art assets for the game and this is starting to bear fruit. These are some of the final art assets that are working through the pipeline: Strategic UFO Artwork Strategic UI Backgrounds (in full 21:9 glory) Weapon Inventory Art Alien Autopsy & GC Corpse Art Soviet Town terror maps This is being coupled to some new gameplay content as well. We've created some new props for the UFO interiors so they're more interesting to play through, and I've updated the UFO crews so there's a better sense of progression through the game - the alien crews get bigger and better equipped as time goes on, and once the larger UFOs start appearing you could be facing Psyons, Sebillians, Wraiths or Androns each time a combat mission spawns. The balancing isn't final by any means but it's another step closer to being finished. I've also taken some inspiration from what we did in X1 with the UFO crews, and added several new variants of each alien. For instance, there are now unarmoured Sebillian non-combatants (pilots / engineers / etc) that spawn inside UFOs and only have pistols, rather than every Sebillian being a well-equipped soldier. This process is more complete for some races than others (the Androns in particular are short on variation) but once some of the new alien variant models start appearing I think we'll have a more varied set of aliens than we did in the first game. We'll also hopefully have a bit more of the writing done by the time the next major build arrives. The tech tree is starting to solidify and I'll be starting to put more attention into the research reports now we have more idea of how things might slot together in the final game. There's some other cool things in the works but I'm starting to run out of space so I'll save them for the update announcement. Sorry for the lack of communications on the forums recently; unfortunately I've just been working too hard to spare the time!