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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).

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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 had a very similar feelings when I played version 3.2.0 recently (got no time yet to try 3.3.0 and 3.4.0) - last time I played the whole 200 days was 2.0.9. Played at veteran. I agree with all of what Skitso wrote. A few remarks below: Cleaners - at the start it is very interesting to have a "human" opponent with some alien missions, but I would like to see the Cleaners interfering with the alien missions, like "cleaning" parties, say after turn 10, cleaner reinforcements would show up and try to destroy the human player to "protect the secret and clean the area" and the destrction of cleaners could be postponed to later in the game. The combined threat of cleaners and aliens at once would be intimidating. The air combat feels different - more demanding now with the homing drones and defensive turrets on some of the UFO´s. Angels are almost no use after day 90 or so, Phantoms are a must, but very expensive. Also to be able to comfortably win every air combat, at least 3 fighters were necessary, in later stages even 3 phantoms with fusion weaponry (2 with missiles and lances, third with torpedoes and missile) What I disliked about the air combat is the new interceptor model - Genesis. The model looks ridiculous (resembling a dragon drawn by a kid... sorry if I am being too honest here, but the model from X1 was really cool with the forward swept wings - now the game uses the same icon during combat, but the model (picture and model in hangar) just looks terrible and small. Pleeeeease, change it.... The previous model resembling su47 was much better. If you added some alien features to the same model it would look just fine... Same goes to the advanced transport Pegasus - a flying box - the model seems too small to the carrying capacity, i kind of feel they should be bigger to fill the space in the hangar a bit more to feel more robust.. It would be perhaps cool if the Pegasus had an upper level - soldiers in the upper level with the tanks on the bottom level. Soldiers with jetpacks could exit the ship from the upper level or there would be the big door on the lower level. Or perhaps a ramp that would descent downwards (similar to skyranger in UFO: EU) Just a thougt.. Economy is also tighter than before - most of the times I had to think what to build and what to skip as the money were very tight - building a solid airforce and good equipped ground force was challenging. 6 bases were a dream never coming true. 2 bases with troops with another one with planes was all I could manage to build until end of the scenario (last UFO appeared around day 380 or so) In general, the game feels solid, there was a lag in the jungle missions, some minor bugs here and there (may be my old PC having hard time only), but the overal feeling was good. The loading times improved a bit as well I believe. The repetition of the missions is a bit annoying. The maps need more levels (high buildings, undeground levels etc). There couls be more mission variety - search and rescue of downed planes (in case UFO downs a military plane or defense of a military base/installation would be nice for example) Well done devs, Looking forward to the next build! P.S. pleeeeease again, better genesis model...

Yeah, we can't really add any more vertical space. The only possible space is the right hand side of the soldier role line; I guess with icons we could maybe have an indicator for it. Something like this:

Hello everyone - we've reached the end of November, so it's time for our monthly development update. This month has been fairly intense but once again the project has made good progress. Milestone 2: The biggest news this month has been the official release of Milestone 2, our first major update since our Early Access launch. I discussed the many upgrades made in Milestone 2 in our previous update so I won't cover them again, but getting everything ready for this release took up most of the month. Our thanks go out to all the testers who were reporting bugs and giving gameplay feedback on the Experimental branches over the past couple of months, as it has been incredibly valuable! Broadly speaking, all this testing meant Milestone 2 launched in pretty good shape - but we've already patched a few major bugs and put out a fix for the funding situation being overly restrictive on the easier difficulty settings. We're continuing to monitor stability and balance issues, so please do let us know if you're encountering problems and we'll consider further patches! Milestone 3: Although Milestone 2 is barely out the door, we're already hard at work on Milestone 3. This update contains the alien Cruiser UFO, which is crewed by aliens carrying deadly Fusion weapons. If you can successfully capture one of these Cruisers, you can unlock the final interceptor and dropship aircraft, plus another tier of infantry weapons and an upgrade for the MARS that turns it into a hovertank. We'll also be continuing to work on the alien AI and the air combat, and we're hoping to add various minor community-requested features into this update too (e.g. the ability to autosell "junk" items after combat). Finally, we're expecting Milestone 3 will have significantly improved loading times compared to earlier versions of the game! Unity 2022 Upgrade: These faster load times will be happening partly because we're in the process of upgrading from Unity 5.5 to Unity 2022. We've already done the necessary technical work for this, but there's always teething issues with a major engine upgrade, so I expect we'll have to spend a couple more weeks fixing things up before things are fully back to normal. Players should see faster load times and better performance when this work is complete, along with proper support for multiple monitors and borderless windowed mode etc. It will also make development work more efficient, as the codebase compiles much more quickly etc. Finally, it'll also bring us one step closer to mod tools - as some of the work we'll be doing upgrading our internal editor tools could be re-used to create a more effective mod editor. I think I'll wrap things up there. If all goes well, we might have an early prototype of Milestone 3 ready for people to play on the Experimental branch by mid-December (if not, it'll be early January). Thanks for reading!

The "access lift" upkeep is actually the representation of the core cost for the base itself. That's why it costs so much. You can think of it as the cost to maintain the lift, ventilation, surface access entrance ways/buildings, surface security etc. Then the cost as a comparison makes more sense.

For the record, this is an observation first, complaint second. If the devs decided to make xenonauts 2 easier to cater to the lower skill players, that's fine by me, It's a good decision. You're gonna upset a lot of players by making a game uncompromisingly difficult, and most of the time, to appease the """hardcore""" playerbase you just need to make the game appear difficult. The skilled players are probably just gonna make a overhaul mod that caters to them, it's a compromise FiraXCOM went with, and it's a good compromise. I've recently replayed xenonauts 1 on insane, and it hit like a whiplash. The game is so much harder it's really hard to compare. Seriously, playing X2 on Commander is like playing x1 on normal. There are so, so many important mechanical changes between the titles that I've felt like were overlooked, I'm gonna try to list the most important ones from most impactful to least: 1. LOS distance This is by far the biggest fundamental change. Both games have an average effective weapon range of 20, but while in xenonauts 2 the soldier view range is 26, in xenonauts 1 it's 17. On top of that, in xenonauts 1 most of the alien sight range is 18, higher than xenonauts and well within the rifle range. This is massive, especially since the AI often abuses that fact. In x1, getting accurately shot from line of sight is very common, to the point where you have to paranoically smoke every possible angle the enemy can shoot you through. In xenonauts 2, it's switched. unless the aliens came out of a building, you will see them before they become a threat, and now YOU out-LOS them, because of sniper rifles. That makes overwatching in an open field a really effective strategy, especially since SR's no longer have a reaction fire penalty. The longer LOS is a good change, but it heavily benefits xenonauts. 2. LOS Symmetry In xenonauts 1, there were some corners where a unit could see a different unit, but not the other way around. This could be used by both sides, but heavily benefited the aliens, first because of longer LOS, and second because catching an experienced soldier off-guard is a lot more rewarding than catching an alien off guard. In x2 sight is symmetric, which again, makes the game easier. 3. Alien AI I mentioned earlier that in x1 aliens abused the hell out of their LOS advantages, but in general they were a lot more defensive. Alien AI in x1 makes you sometimes think they're cheating (they're not, but their sight advantages make them look like they do), and in general they camp a lot more, making them a lot more difficult to kill. in x2 they practically run in the open. X1 aliens sometimes were suicidal too, but only if they were sure that they could kill at least 1 of your soldiers. This is already in a roadmap to be changed, but it's still currently a significant factor towards a difficulty decrease 4. Alien damage in xenonauts 1, on insane the first enemy you fight deals 66 average damage. In xenonauts 2, the first enemy you fight deals 25 damage. Granted, armor values in xenonauts 1 are higher, but not that much higher. While in xenonauts 2 a soldier can still be one shot, in xenonauts 1 a soldier is usually one shot. Also, alien rifle does not currently have a burst function, meaning that they rarely suppress your soldiers outside of servitors, and making parking ballistic shields at melee range towards them a viable strategy. But even if they had it, burst in x1 is a lot better than burst in x2, but that's another topic. 5. Air game That's a huge topic on its own, but to avoid making an even bigger wall of text, let's just say that with the newest version x1 air game is significantly harder than x2, despite the foxtrot nonsense. UFOS damage your funding a lot more, they outspeed your basic interceptors much faster, and you have to actually sometimes maybe do some maneuvering. In x2 you can just facetank almost everything now with basic angels. 6. Cover destruction It's a lot easier to destroy cover in x2 than it is in x1. Too easily in my opinion, the aliens just can't hide from you at all. This is also a good place to mention that throwables in this game cost less to throw, and can be thrown further, and more accurately. 7. Training center Xenonauts 1 units were deceptively not that replaceable. If your soldier died, you had to replace it with a private, and privates freaking sucked, sometimes weren't even able to carry the full gear. (until you get predator armor, which is a win condition) In xeno 2, you can easily train your soldiers up so they catch up to your own guys. Too easily too be honest, I think the training is too effective at its job, by mid game you have many 90-100 TU monsters. I think the diminishing returns from the training center should be increased. 8. Shot preview This can appear as just a QOL, but being able to triangulate reliably if a shot from that position has clear LOS or not makes you significantly more lethal against aliens, In xenonauts 1 you had to practically guess, and a lot of times you were wrong, and when you were wrong you paid for it dearly. Sometimes you thought you were safe behind cover when it turned out the alien had a flanked shot, and sometimes you thought that position was a flank, when it actually wasn't. Now you don't have to take a risk like that. 9. Vehicles Xeno 1 vehicles sucked, MARS is amazing, and you can have TWO of them mid game. Enough said. 10. Alien abilities I know that xeno 2 has a lot more alien abilities, but nothing it has compares to xenonauts 1 psionics, not even the new wraiths. To make it fair, there are areas where xeno 2 is harder: 1. Higher enemy count In xeno 1 the first mission contains 3-5 aliens, it's much more in xeno 2, but it doesn't compensate for the difficulty because they are a LOT less threatening individually. 2. Timed missions A common complaint, but once you get used to it, the significantly longer LOS distance allows you to move quicker without being shot to death, so they're still more than manageable. It's also worth noting that just because a game is more difficult, it doesn't mean that it's better. Xenonauts 2 is an overall better title than Xeno 1 despite the major difficulty drop, a lot of difficulty Xeno1 wasn't designed that well, and made the game tedious to play on insane. Xeno 2 is a lot more fun in its gameplay, it's just that a lack of challenge takes away a lot of spice from the game. A lot of the changes that make the game easier make the game better, but if the game is intended to be about as hard as xeno 1, It should have a bunch of balance passes.

Milestone 2 is not yet ready for public consumption, but it is available in a rough form for people who want to help us experiment with a few new mechanics. To access the build, enter the branch password xenonautsproto and switch to the Prototype branch. However, please read the whole post before doing so! We're testing out a few new mechanics that we want to get people's opinions about before we commit to updating the UI and getting new artwork done etc. I'll spend a bit more time than normal explaining the logic behind the design decisions here, as that will hopefully allow people to tell us whether they think the changes achieve their intended goals or not. Panic: One of the biggest problems with Milestone 1 is that there's no easy way to reduce Panic in a specific region, which means that on harder difficulty settings you need to build additional bases and aircraft as quickly as possible otherwise you'll quickly reach the point where you start losing regions. Panic will now decrease by 10% in each region at the end of each month. However, the Panic reduction for shooting down UFOs has been halved from -2 to -1. This means that Panic generated from Cleaner activity or Alien Bases or failed tactical missions will dissipate more quickly, while making interceptor coverage *slightly* less beneficial (although it's still pretty strong). Note that due to a bug this is happening before the region loss check (which means you need ~110 Panic to lose a region) but we'll change this if the change is popular. Also, this change only solves half of the problem in Milestone 1, as the player still lacks a targeted way to reduce Panic in a region. However I think it's a useful first step. Funding: Funding is no longer dependent on Panic level. A region will grant you full funding (which increases as you progress down the storyline) unless you lose the region, in which case funding will fall to zero. This change was made to support some other experimental changes I've not put in this build. But it means that building a base in a region doesn't increase income as much. Previously you'd get extra funds from shooting down UFOs and completing the crash sites, but then also gain extra funding from the fact keeping Panic low in the region granted extra funding. This hopefully means it's less essential to rush to cover the whole world with your planes as soon as possible. Mission Order: The game now starts with a Cleaner deathmatch mission, which is then followed by a Secton Abduction site. The plan is to make the opening Cleaner mission a bit more exciting - potentially even a continuation of the base defence mission from the tutorial where you clear the base of the attacking Cleaners, then evacuate to your new base. But the goal is to add an extra Cleaner mission and use that as a way to introduce them better at the start of the game. We've then slightly slowed down the progression over the next three months, and in particular we've moved the Cleaner Intel Hub mission back a couple of weeks so it comes after the first UFO crash site. We're open to ideas about how we can make the Cleaner mission sequence a bit more interesting, as it seems like not everyone likes the Cleaner Network idea where the main way to advance is just to capture more Cleaner Data on missions. Feel free to throw ideas out on this topic. Tech Tree / Item Upgrades: One of the recurring discussion points on the forums is whether Accelerated Weapons are a "trap" or not, and I've attemped to make their purpose a bit more clear through some tech tree changes. Accelerated weapons are now an upgrade for Ballistic weapons - i.e. a one-off project that permanently upgrades all Ballistic weapons to be Accelerated weapons. The same is also now true for the Warden Armour, which is now an upgrade for Defender Armour which increases the protection offered. As such, I've moved Guardian Armour forward in the tech tree so it can be unlocked off Scout UFOs rather than Destroyers. This means the player is given the choice of two relatively quick and cheap upgrades at the start of the game, but are also given the option to research more advanced weapons (lasers) and armour (Guardian) within the first month. But you're also presented the option to pursue the story research, which increases your funding - so hopefully this presents the player some interesting choices in the early game to try different strategies. To stop this being overwhelming, I've moved the Dragonfly and Phantom to be unlocked off Destroyers rather than Scouts. Finally, I've tried to expand the item upgrade options. There's a project that allows you to reduce the weight of Defender Armour, and Laser Weapons now have two upgrades that provide Recharging Ammo and increased Damage respectively. Guardian Armour also has an upgrade that increases the protection it offers which is unlocked from Destroyers. I'd be interested to know whether people like these increased upgrade options. Soldier Module System: I've removed all the existing soldier "modules" which could be placed in the soldier tactical vest and these are now replaced by the following set up: Extra Armour: all armour now weighs less and offers less protection, but there's a Heavy Armour toggle in the bottom right that will increase protection at the cost of extra weight. This is designed to make the armour more flexible rather than "heavy" armour like the Guardian being useless for low-Strength soldiers. The only gameplay consideration is "can the soldier carry the extra weight?" Armour Module: you can now choose a single module from a second dropdown below the existing Armour dropdown. At the start you can either choose from a rebreather that provides smoke protection, a +3 Acc boost or a +5 Bravery boost, however almost all the modules from Milestone 1 reappear as you progress down the tech tree. Obviously the question is simply which one module you choose to use. Jetpack: as previously, the jetpack is another toggled option. I just don't think it's useful enough that anyone would ever use it if we made it part of the Armour Module list. My question here is simple - do you prefer this to the module system in Milestone 1 where your inventory was full of modules? There's scope to add extra artwork and improve the UI if people like the basic idea, but it'd be nice to know people's initial impression of the changes. However, from a design perspective there's some overlap with the Item Upgrade system above. Some of the modules could potentially be folded into upgrades for the armour (particularly the Jetpack) - although then the danger is that you have soldiers that can do everything, and once your armour is upgraded you no longer have to choose between say a +TU boost, or a +ACC boost, or health regeneration, etc. Let me know your thoughts on this setup and where you'd like to see the design go. Incomplete Balance Changes: These are further balance changes I expect to make prior to Milestone 2 reaching our main Steam branches: Panic will be checked for region loss before the -10% monthly decrease occurs. Abduction missions will not end when the timer expires. Instead, the tubes will be present for X turns before teleporting away, and you get rewards for each one you open. However all the aliens must still be eliminated for victory. Starting Cleaner mission will probably happen immediately after beginning the game, before you go to strategy (rather than being a mission you do on day 2 or so).

This caught my eye... jetpack would be extremely useful if the maps were just more vertical and being higher grounds provided more buffs. Changing accelerated weapons to being an upgrade to ballistics sounds like a good idea, but I'd like the upgrads to be weapon type specific. Similar upgrade path to armor doesn't sound like an improvement Item upgrades sound sweet. More the better. Regarding the module system, I kinda enjoy the Tetris mini game we have atm, where I need to balance my backpack between modules, weapons, grenades and other items. Changing the abduction missions to be one more "kill all aliens" mission feels a step in a wrong direction. Regarding the cleaner mission chain and progression: Gathering intel for intitial progress is fine and I love the mission (best map so far), but the daily automatic percentage gain after that feels somewhat gamey and boring. You should add more quick and simple cleaner missions where player could earn that progression instead, capture additional intel, capture and interrogate cleaners etc. I also suggested somewhere that cleaners could be added to crash site missions to clean the wreck and alien corpses. This would add a nice new dynamic to those missions where the more player waits before raiding the site, the more there would be cleaners. Avoiding these add-on cleaners could also push people to do these crash site missions at night, before cleaners arrive. Edit: Here's my initial suggestion

Hi all, To help me with Modding for Xenonauts 2 I've created a Mod Loader based on a forum post by asdfcyber (https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/28131-first-v25-modding-impressions/#comment-192760) It uses mono.cecil to patch the Assembly-CSharp.dll and inject code that loads mods from a folder of your choosing. Essentially you run the Mod Loader exe and it'll inject the Mod Loader code if needed and then starts Xenonauts 2. It will then call a LoadMods method in the Xenonauts.XenonautsMain constructor. The repo also contains an example mod that shows how to override existing methods using Harmony (https://github.com/pardeike/Harmony) and how to format the mod so that the Mod Loader can detect it. The repo can be found here: https://github.com/38Simulated/XenonautsModding Not sure if there are that many people out there looking into modding the game, but I thought I'd post something just in case it was of any use to anyone.

I love base defense missions - in theory at least. They are tough, tense and offer nice variation between offense oriented missions. However, current X2 base defense missions are somewhat dull and one note assaults where the bulk of the conflict is often resolved in one huge, non tactical firefight in on one or two of the hangars. Here's few thoughts to improve them: Add a command room to defend like in X1 Aliens should have other objectives than to just kill all Xenonaut units like destroy rooms to disable them so the player needs to repair them later, assault command room for direct loss, kill scientists etc. to force player to be active defending them. Aliens should have few free turns at the start to better spread out. AI improvements needed of course. Room design is a bit dull and repetitive. Especially with adjacency bonuses, you often have three or four identical rooms side by side which looks fake and makes gameplay boring. On geoscape, UFO's on the base attack mission should spawn later in the wave to be more of a threat and be possibly companied with air superiority UFO's. (Same with terror and base build missions which spawn too infrequently) Thoughts?

Here's an idea, inspired by @Vitruviansquid's medical module suggestion mentioned here. Currently, medkits / advanced medkits are sufficiently small, light, and useful that I give every Xenonaut one. Do you do the same? I wonder if it would be more interesting if medkits were changed to be heavy and big -- perhaps taking up 4x5 of the tactical vest, leaving just one row for some ammo clips and grenades. This would lead to a medic role / loadout, alongside rifleman, assault, etc. There could be a new type of equipment -- bandages -- that are small and light, so more easily carried by all members of a team. Bandages could stop bleeding, but not heal any HPs. Currently I know that if a soldier gets injured, everyone's got a medkit so they could heal themselves, or be healed by a nearby buddy, so it's not really something I think about. My suggested change would lead to more interesting loadout choices and squad tactics for a player. It could also tie into the current, slightly confusing, game mechanic where dead Xenonauts are corpses, but actually have a chance to survive a mission and fully recover after a long time back at HQ. Maybe dead Xenonauts stay dead, unless someone with a medkit gets to them within x turns and uses the medkit to stabalise them, giving them a x% chance of surviving. This could lead to come very cool and heroic stories where a Xenonaut carries their "dead" comrade to the medic to get them stabalised in the nick of time. It would also make the soldier's survival more dependent on a player's actions rather than the roll of a dice (which I think is how it works at the moment?) Advanced medkits could increase the turn limit and / or percentage chance of survival. Hopefully it wouldn't be too difficult a change for the developers to make. It would make the game more difficult, but that could be balanced with a bit of thought. Perhaps these new-style medkits could heal more damage than the current ones.

If you are going to push Cleaners to be more significant part of the game, making them come and clean UFO crash sites after certain time period would also be a nice and organic way to make player choose between night and extra cleaners and also give a tangible reason for their existence. First few cleaners could be added to crash site after 5(?) hours and a couple more after 10(?) hours. Crash sites could also be "cleaned away" from geoscape instead of player being to sell it to local forces until Cleaner HQ is finally destroyed. This kind of additional organic layer of gameplay and choise would IMO add a lot to the game.

Same here - I also got TFTD first. And to be honest, the original X-Com was a little bit of a letdown afterwards, because TFTD was gloomier, stranger and more oppressive than X-Com and it had atmosphere in spades. I loved the larger levels, "light management" in deep sea or night missions and the overall Lovecraftian horror atmosphere. TFTD is my absolute nr. 1 favorite game of all the time. I even prefer the Dos original over the OpenXcom version (despite all the advantages it has): the reason is the AI. Half of the AI in the original TFTD was fully random - and this is why the creatures moved and behaved so strange, which made them feel even more "alien". In other games, especially modern ones, the "creatures" move and fight like human soldiers or a human squad, total kills the immersion for me. Another detail that the other games lack: starting in the closed sub and having to open the door is such an atmospheric beginning of a mission. One always starts there, does not know what is outside until opening it. Running down the already open aircraft in the X-Com derivatives never reaches the atmosphere and feeling of anticipation of TFTD missions (what comes close to TFTD in this regard is "Teleglitch" mission starts, but it is a totally different genre). Not to speak of the strange alien structures of TFTD, like the colonies which looked like out of a Lynch movie, loved the colors... I wonder why nobody ever recreated this absolute gem. BTW: I still have the original European version with the beautiful cover:

So, just completed Build 1 and I liked it a lot! Obviously still has work to do but in great shape. So I'm going to be posting some ideas. All are free to use, I don't want any rights or credits, etc. etc. Anyway, I love research from capturing aliens. It was so fun in XCOM, it was fun in the Firaxis games, it's just fun! It's a little bit of flavor. Obviously there's the advanced medkits and regen module, and the mentarch, but here's some more ideas. Mantid - Compound Eye Module Engineering project, tactical module grants 180 (or 120 or 270) degree vision. Cool, flavorful, fun. Not sure it's great, but hey that's where this should be. Secton - Squadsight Module Allows anyone with a Tactical Module to fire at anyone in LOS of another person with a tactical module without penalty. Could be hard to code, just my idea based off their ability. Alternatively, +3 accuracy if within 5 spaces of another person with a Secton upgraded module. Psion - Mesmer Grenades Small radius, cause non-robotics to stand up, lose all time units, and walk a few squares in a random direction. Reaper - Reaper Claws Absolutely deadly close range weapon. Like really super high damage. Bonus if it uses the idea at the end Servitor (requires EMP to allow capture) - Heal Beam Secondary weapon, lets vehicles carry a 3 range medkit that can heal other vehicles too. Cyberdrone - Cyberdisk Vehicle Floating/hovering version of the Mars rover. Bonus idea - Rather than unlocking everything for manufacturing, manufacturing the upgraded modules requires captured aliens. So more Stalker or Healing modules requires more captured Stalkers/Sebillians, Reaper Claws need Reapers, etc. Gives a good minigame for capturing, and makes capture stuff more enticing to bring. Anyway, great game. Want ot post more thoughts after I have more time to digest.

Hello everyone - we've reached the end of July, so it's time for our monthly development update. It's been an exciting month, with Xenonauts 2 finally launching into Early Access on July 18th. The launch has been a huge success, with the game selling over 40,000 copies in the past two weeks, and the whole development team is really grateful to anyone who supported us by buying a copy! Here's what we've been up to this month and what we have planned for the coming month! Critical Bugs & Performance Fixes: Almost all of this month has been spent fixing critical bugs like crashes or anything else that ruins the gameplay experience for players. We actually thought the game was pretty stable going into Early Access, but going from a pool of twenty to thirty regular testers to having tens of thousands of players exposed a LOT of issues we were previously unaware of. The last couple of weeks have therefore been rather intense, as we've had to patch the game numerous times to address these issues. Thankfully the worst of this should now be behind us; we released 1.28b on Friday which improved performance and has fixed the bulk of the critical bugs. Work continued over the weekend and we've now fixed the memory leak players have been encountering and also (finally) managed to find and fix the annoying bug where terrain objects would sometimes get destroyed but not visually update (leading to units being able to shoot or move through what appeared to be a solid object). Our immediate priority is to finish up the last couple of crashes we're aware of, and fix a couple more serious gameplay bugs - e.g. grenades missing when displaying 100% chance to hit. This should leave the foundations of the game in good enough shape to move on to other tasks. Loading Times: Once that is done, we'll be starting work on optimising the load times - hopefully this will happen towards the end of this week. There's not much more to say on this point beyond the fact that we're aware of the issue and we'll be working on it soon. Milestone 2: We're then planning to spend the remainder of the month working on Milestone 2. This will be the first major update for the game and it will involve changes to the campaign, which unfortunately means it will break save games (although you can continue to play your Milestone 1 campaign on the Legacy branches if you want). As the programmers have a lot of bugs and usability improvements to be working on, I'm planning to focus on the air combat balance and the pacing issues in the existing campaign for Milestone 2. This is likely to extend the playable time beyond 180 days but it will not introduce additional UFO types to the game - it's more likely that we'll be expanding the role of the Cleaners at the start of the game instead. The first Milestone 2 build will likely arrive on the Experimental branch in the next two or three weeks, where it will go through a number of iterations based on player feedback before being released onto the standard branches. Expanding the Team: Finally, the income from our Early Access launch means we can now expand the team to speed up development. The first positions we're looking to fill are that of a Level Designer and a Gameplay Programmer. If anyone is interested in applying, I've linked the job posts below: Level Design job post Gameplay Programmer job post Overall, July was a great month for the project and we've really enjoyed seeing people playing the game we've been working on for so long. We look forward to delivering more upgrades in August!

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.

As @Chris told us in his latest monthly update: "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." So Goldhawk is going to revamp some (all?) existing sound effects and also add some new ones while they are at it. This is of course very exciting, so let's make a list of sounds we want added or improved. Remember that UI and alien units sounds are already on the list. Needs better sfx: Human injury and death sounds Weapon sounds Needs new sfx: UFO ambiance (low frequency humming around and inside UFO's) Alien base ambiance (low frequency humming or something eerie and alien) Panicing units' screaming and crying Alien machinery proximity sfx (like abduction tubes, teleports, terror bombs etc.) Psionic effect sounds (mesmerize, psionic triangluation etc.)

Are any other alien races going to have grenades? Smoke, flash, gas, incendiary and other grenade types would certainly spice up the game.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! 4.6.0 Reversion & Save Compatibility: We released 4.6.0 on Friday and decided to revert back to 4.5.0 roughly 12 hours later due to stability issues in the save / load system. This update fixes those stability issues and will allow players to continue campaigns from 4.5.0, but unfortunately any saves from 4.6.0 will be broken (which they likely were anyway). Nonetheless, if anyone really wants to continue playing 4.6.0 then they can do so on our Experimental Legacy branches. Due to the reversion, these patch notes also contain the changes that were originally made in 4.6.0. Gameplay Updates: Added research text for the Andron Autopsy research project. Expanded the Funding Report so it shows the base funding level for each region, plus the modifier based on the region Panic. All research projects and missions that increase funding now list these values in terms of base funding (the amount you'll actually get varies based on Panic). UFOs now have a limit on the number of times they can land in a single mission, and fixed some issues to do with the take-off process that should help avoid the situation where a UFO spends days flying around the Geoscape while repeatedly taking off and landing. 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). Androns and other robotic enemies should now play an appropriately mechanical gib animation if they suffer overdamage. Updated the "construct building" sound on the Base screen. Added a sound effect when launching an aircraft onto the Geoscape. Balance Changes: Colossus Armour now reduces the wearer's Reflexes by 20. Sebillian Time Units increased to 75 (from 60), and Reflexes increased to 50 (from 25). Andron Strength increased to 80 (from 50), Reflexes decreased to 25 (from 50), and TU decreased to 55 (from 60). Stalker Armour cloaking field defensive bonus reduced to -1.5 enemy Accuracy per tile (from -2 per tile). You can no longer complete the Fusion Lance or Shielded Plating aircraft upgrade processes without completing the earlier projects in the sequence (making them consistent with the other aircraft upgrade projects). Bugfixes: Fixed a crash in the load / save system (fix for a bug introduced in 4.6.0). Fixed a crash in the air combat that could occur if you accidentally right-clicked on one of the Evasive Roll buttons. Fixed a crash in the tactical combat that would occur if you pressed Esc while hovering over a grenade tile. Fixed another crash that could occur during the AI turn. Fixed the Abduction mission on day ~55 incorrectly spawning twice. Fixed a visual issue on the soldier equip screen where items in the Primary / Secondary would appear doubled when equipping a new loadout (fix for a bug introduced in 4.6.0). Fixed alien / Cleaner weapons being loaded with duplicated ammo clips, making their weight incorrect if you picked them up in the tactical combat. Fixed the You Sunk My Battleship achievement not unlocking after shooting down a Battleship UFO (which won't arrive until Milestone 5). Fixed some indestructible walls in the Abductor UFO. Fixed an issue with a climbable cliff on a Polar map being too close to a building and causing the pathfinding to think units could walk through the air onto a building roof. Fixed some animation issues with the unarmed Colossus armour.

I'm starting to enjoy the game quite a bit but I can't help but feel a bit concerned regarding how rudimentary and poor the game's logic still is when it comes to what it considers as cover. See the image below, my soldier is aiming over some waist high objects at a Cleaner. The box is next to him so the game goes "Ok, you're good there, no way that's blocking the shot oh but what's this? There is a waist high wall adjacent to that box and you are NOT next to it therefore, it might block your shot". It's just a bit frustrating that even with the game's upgrade to 3D from X1, though obviously an immense improvement, there is still stuff like this that just doesn't make any sense and pulls me out of the experience. If the Cleaner in the image was crouching then maybe I'd see why there'd be a chance for the shot to get blocked but he's standing up 2 feet away from my soldier and he's completely exposed from the torso up, the box nor the wall should count as cover. Are there any improvements or fixes being worked on for things like this? Or is it just going to be something I have to put up with as long as I play this game? I think a basic fix would be to somehow take into account distance and whether or not the target is crouched behind partial cover objects. It might already work like this, I don't know, but I think waist high objects should only provide half their cover bonus if the target is standing, just to alleviate the issue a bit (So that in the situation depicted in the image below for example, there would at least only be a 20% chance of the shot getting blocked rather than a whopping 40%). When it comes to the distance, I think waist high objects' cover bonus should vary highly depending on the distance between the shooter and the target. Obviously if I'm standing next to their cover, it should work as it does now, no way the shot is getting blocked. But I don't think it needs to immediately be considered a full low cover block the instant there is an extra tile in the way. It should be like a 5% chance for the shot to get blocked, then increment that slowly the larger the distance. I think overall that would make low cover way more interesting and also only reserve shots blocked by low cover in those types of situations as utter catastrophes rather than common occurrences. (With the stuff I've mentioned here, the situation below would make the waist high wall a 2.5% chance that my shot gets blocked, 5% divided by 2 due to the target standing). I hope this feedback makes some sense and I hope I didn't come off as too presumptuous, I'm not a game dev of course so maybe you guys have some good reasons for why things work the way they do but I personally feel like the changes I've mentioned above would make the game way more satisfying and "logical". Thanks for taking the time to read!

Our Milestone 3 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 2 is still available (instructions on how to do so here). This initial version of Milestone 3 is an "developer" build with additional logging that causes slower performance and occasional flashes of red debug text while you play. We'll switch back to a normal "release" build without this extra logging by the end of the week. We've decided to do this because we want to ensure anyone suffering issues from our upgrade to Unity 2022 can easily provide us the information to fix them - we'll be watching the forums / discord / Steam forums carefully for feedback and bug reports, so please let us know if you encounter any bugs or other problems! As we've made a LOT of changes to the game in this update, I'll start by highlighting the most important improvements here with a little developer commentary. New Content: Additional content is always nice, and Milestone 3 contains the new Cruiser UFO which unlocks a lot of new technology for the player to play with! Although is still not possible to complete the campaign (that will be Milestone 5 as there's two more UFOs yet to come), the playable time for the campaign has been extended significantly. The playable time for the campaign has been extended to 260 days (up from 180 days in Milestone 2), 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) Unity 2022: Players have been requesting two major improvements that were struggling to deliver on our outdated version of Unity - faster load times, and proper support for borderless windowed mode. We therefore upgraded to Unity 2022 so we could give you those things in Milestone 3! Borderless Fullscreen mode should now be properly supported in the settings menu. The monitor resolution settings are now handled natively by Unity rather than through our own code so please report any strange behaviour as a bug so we can look into it (particularly if you have multiple monitors or some kind of unusual hardware setup). Load times should now be reduced by about 30% across all sections of the game, we're hoping to reduce this by another 10%-20% in Milestone 4 (NOTE: this won't be apparent for the next few days, as all the extra debug logging from a "developer" build cancels out the improved loading speed). The tactical mission briefing is now also shown on the loading screen, rather than at the start of the mission, which gets you into the action faster once the load is complete! AI Improvements: Many players found the primitive AI in earlier versions of the game a bit immersion-breaking or easy to exploit. We've made significant AI upgrades in Milestone 3 that mean enemies should be more intelligent and civilians should be less suicidal. We're continuing to work on this, but personally I think a major improvement is already visible. We've upgraded the general decision-making of the AI, and also addressing various specific issues including: 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. Cleaner reinforcements will now act more aggressively on most maps, and move quickly towards your dropship / extraction area. Bleeding Wound Healing & Bleeding Aliens: Community feedback suggested it was unfair that aliens did not suffer bleeding wounds like Xenonauts did - so now they do (although Sebillians heal them immediately). We've also added a heal chance to all Bleeding Wounds, so they're no longer a guaranteed death sentence if there's no Medikit nearby. Aliens now suffer Bleeding Wounds when they take damage in the same way that Xenonauts do. However, each Bleeding Wound now has 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. Usability Improvements: Although Milestone 3 was focused on adding new content, we also added a couple of usability features that were frequently requested by the community to make soldier management and item management easier. Pre-Mission Soldier Equip / Arrangement - we've added a button on the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen that allows easy access to the screen where you can set the positions of your soldiers within the dropship, 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. We're likely to expand this system in future. Abduction missions: Abduction missions have been updated to address player concerns. They are now explained better, and no longer end immediately when the timer expires - but the Panic gain or reduction of the mission is now tied to the number of freed civilians, so the result should feel less arbitrary (now the civilian AI is improved, you're also expected to protect the civilians and you will get reduced rewards if they die). Abduction missions no longer end immediately when the timer expires and the abduction tubes disappear; the mission will now continue until all alien forces are eliminated (effectively these are now deathmatch missions with an additional time-limited objective). 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. You still gain Alien Alloys for each abduction tube you disable, but the Panic increase or reduction from the mission depends on how many of the 10 civilians you rescue: If you don't attempt the mission at all, you get +20 local panic +2 panic for each civilian remaining in an abduction tube when the timer runs out and the tubes teleport away -2 panic for each civilian freed from an abduction tube that survives the mission +0 panic for a civilian freed from the tube who is killed before the end of the mission Data Raid missions: These are the missions where you have to capture Data Sticks from the Cleaner office. Relatively minor changes here, just some UI improvements and a tweak to the objectives that means if a soldier carrying Data Sticks is killed you don't necessarily have to send another soldier to recover the Data Sticks from their body if you don't want to (this was mostly done for reasons of lore consistency). 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. 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: The changes made to the Extract VIP mission have all been around player convenience; making it more obvious where you need to go and when the enemy reinforcements will be arriving, etc. 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. 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: Not all players understood that you were expected to leave 3 free slots in your dropship on this mission so you had space to pick up the 3 soldiers that needed to be rescued. To make this more obvious, we've added placeholder soldiers in the dropship that fill these slots (this also means you can view their stats prior to the mission). Added "ghost" soldiers to the dropship when launching towards the Soldier Rescue mission. 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: Soldier Progression: 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). However, the soldiers you can rescue on the Soldier Rescue missions now have +3 to all their base stats, in addition to the +3 to all stats they get for being a Sergeant rather than a Private. Strategic Layer Balancing: Duration of crash sites reduced from 72 hours to 32 hours. Reduced the completion time of the initial research project, so you can now begin work on the new research immediately after winning the ATLAS Base mission. Delayed the first possible alien retaliation mission, as it would frequently spawn in the same wave as the first Destroyer (meaning the player had often just fought a battle when it happened and had a damaged squad). Reduced the number of Cleaners in the Cleaner Base to make it a bit more manageable if you manage to unlock it early. Wraith Destroyers now contain 1 fewer enemy. Increased Alloys gained from Observers, Abductors and Cruiser UFOs by 50%. Increased Alenium / Alloys gained from Alien Base missions by roughly 100%. Warden Armour now requires 6 Alloys to build (up from 4). Accelerated Weapons now require more Alloys to build, with the most expensive weapons requiring 6 (up from 4). Laser weapons now require more Alloys and Alenium to build, with the most expensive requiring 6 of each (up from 4). Swapped the Alloys and Alenium cost of advanced building upgrades; these generally now require twice as much Alenium as they do Alloys. Construction time of Radar Array reduced from 20 days to 15 days. Training Center building increased in cost from $250k to $350k. Doubled the duration of Corpse Analysis II engineering projects. Tactical Combat balancing: 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. Using a healing item will no longer trigger enemy reaction fire. Medikit weight increased to 25 (from 15). Reaper Zombies now have 70HP (up from 40HP). Mentarch can no longer crouch or be suppressed. Slight Accuracy reduction on MARS Cannon weapons. Alien melee weapons can no longer gib units through overdamage. Enabled reaction fire on the various alien melee weapons (mantids, sebillians, reapers, mentarch, zombies). Air Combat balancing: Alien missiles in the air combat now have a 0.35x damage against units that can do evasive roll; this means alien Fighters and alien Interceptors are now a bit weaker when autoresolving air combat battles. 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 Bomber UFO weapons updated. The main cannon now fires faster and destroys armour more quickly, and the secondary weapon now has a much smaller fire arc but can rotate to cover the rear and sides (but not the front) of the UFO. Unescorted Bombers are therefore now weaker against agile planes like the Phantom, but keeping away from the rotating turret can be more challenging if there are escort UFOs present. 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. Double clicking an empty slot on the Soldier Equip screen will bring up the soldier assignment menu directly, so you don't need to select the slot and click the button any more. Clicking a weapon in the soldier inventory on the Soldier Equip screen will select it in the Armory, allowing you to add more ammo quickly (let us know if this ends up being annoying). Set the large rock mesas in the Polar and Desert maps to be significantly tougher, and added proper destruction states to the Polar one. Updated the Soldier Equip screen so items in the inventory and in the base armory panel now both have a slight highlight on mouse hover. There's now a small animation when soldier pawns switch places in the dropship (on the Aircraft screen), which makes it easier to understand what's happening. Added tooltip description text to the Stalker Armour and Exosuit Armour. Improved the performance for the Farm cabbage fields, as some players were experiencing FPS drops there. Updated the sort order on several items in the soldier armory and in the base stores so things are grouped more sensibly. Abduction tubes and the various Stealth unit shaders (Wraiths / Stealthsuit) no longer draw under the shroud. Security guards in the dockyards now have little hats so they don't look quite so much like Cleaners. 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). 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 reloading a weapon in the tactical inventory not playing the reload sound. Fixed the tactical camera getting stuck at a weird angle if you were halfway through rotating it and something else tried to take control of the camera (sighting an enemy, etc). 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 Autofill Drosphip button not appearing immediately if you used RMB to unassign a soldier from a full dropship. 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). Fixed a few types of aliens not correctly showing the red obstruction shading when they are hidden behind an object. Fixed a minor issue with fire paths where shooting round corners was more permissive if you were shooting through an adjacent unit. Fixed a typo in the Electroshock Pistol name. Removed some incorrect tooltips from the Mod Manager panel.

God I absolutely agree with this wholeheartedly. It's incredibly annoying how some people keep throwing out shit like "BUT REAL SOLDIERS CAN CARRY 50 KITCHEN SINKS AS PART OF BASIC TRAINING" or inflating the soldier count to some absurd number like 3 dozen and never actually give out how exactly it would improve the game and or result in meaningful choices by the player. It's always some vague high minded concept about "being more real" when all it results in actuality is tedium or flat player choice.

Giving First aid doesn't currently have much gameplay depth and lacks interesting choices to make. There's two main issues: -Firstly, first aid kits are too small, weight too little and have infinite capacity, so almost everyone can carry one into a battle and heal as much as needed with it. -Secondly, TU cost of giving first aid is set too low, so even critically wounded units can be healed quickly while surrounded by enemies. My suggestions: -Make first aid kits heavier and larger so carrying one is a clear choice. I'd love to have to make a separate medic role. -Make stabilizing bleeding more demanding. Like 30TU per bleed wound or similar. (It'd be cool to have like multiple medics trying to stabilize a badly wounded soldier before bleeding to death.) -Make healing and stabilizing bleeding wounds separate actions. -Make healing cost more TU's. Like 1HP per 1TU. -Let me choose how much I want to spend TU's when healing. (If I remember correctly X1 had this already) -Receiving first aid should cost the same amount of TU's that giving it takes. -First aid kits shouldn't be infinite. (Another good reason for a medic role that could pack multiple first aid kits. One first aid kit should be enough for healing like 120HP. Removing one bleed wound would cost 30HP. So with one first aid kit one could for example remove 2 bleed wounds and still heal 60HP. Or remove 1 bleed wound and then heal 90HP. -Maybe add a separate small medkit that can only be used to remove one bleeding wound. (Single use)

I suggest to transfer surviving soldiers from the Prologue (training mission) to the main game to get more immersion and player involvement in the game's plot (as done in XCom1 and 2; or Phoenix Point).

As it stands the Cleaners are a neat idea similar to EXALT and ADVENT from the nuXCOM games, but they're fairly underutilized. Their presence is limited to 4 missions (5 if you count the tutorial): the mission where you steal 10 data sticks, the 2 regional command VIP assassinations, and then the final assault on the Cleaner base. They've also only got the 2 enemy types: the suited agents and the hazmat-wearing soldiers. So here are some suggestions on expanding not only their presence in the early game but also mission variety: VIP Rescue Mission Your Operations Director identifies a heavily guarded compound where a certain VIP is being held by the Cleaners. Her agents are unable to infiltrate or extract the VIP, thus it falls upon you and your heavily armed soldiers to perform a prison break. As the VIP is being held at the facility for only a certain window of time, the mission has a time limit on geoscape. The compound would have a mix of Cleaner soldiers and agents as guards, with reinforcements incoming as with the regional command missions. The VIP would be held in a similar cell thing as the civilians in alien abduction missions, and once you free them they can be ordered around like your soldiers. Optional objectives could be gathering more data sticks and perhaps rescuing other identified Persons of Interest. Victory is when you extract your team along with the VIP and any PoI. Rewards would be panic reduction in the region the mission is in, increased with each PoI rescued. Sting Operation/Convoy Interception Mission Your Operations Director's agents either located the route a Cleaner convoy carrying valuable alien equipment is traveling through or set up a trap for a Cleaner strike team. Either way, there's a limited amount of time to intercept them. The enemies would be a large amount of Cleaner soldiers, with the convoy perhaps having a few lower ranking aliens like Sectons or Sebillians hidden away. Like base defense, you would be able to set up the position of your soldiers within certain areas and had the entire map revealed as you have already scouted out the area and set up the ambush, however you would still have the first turn. Victory is from killing or incapacitating all enemies, with the rewards being either some alien alloys and alenium from a convoy interception or a regional panic reduction and Cleaners network progress for sting operation. Cleaner presence on crash sites Right now the Cleaners not only don't really live up to their name as "Cleaners" but a crash site with 1 hour left on the timer is no different from one with 2 days left. It would make sense that the Cleaners clean up the crash sites and make it so delaying a crash site has consequences. Perhaps for each day that passes, there is more Cleaner presence at the crash site, with more of the ambient civilians replaced by 1 or 2 Cleaner soldiers. This would go away once the Cleaners' base is destroyed, but adds some more urgency in the early game to take on crash sites. Cleaner Heavy Simple, a Cleaner soldier that uses a machine gun (same stats as ours) and is heavily armored. The look can borrow from EOD uniforms or other heavily armed military gear such as this, this, or this. They'd only appear on missions with a heavy Cleaner presence such as sting operation or convoy interception or the Cleaner base defense, or perhaps as part of later reinforcement waves to really force the player to extract. Would like to hear others' thoughts and suggestions along these lines!

Hey Team, Old time Xcom, TFTD, Apoc and nu-com (long war) player. Have been following for awhile, not sure If I'd like the vibe of xenonauts but took the plunge and its shaping up to be a lot of fun! I hope you keep building the game out as the basis is very enjoyable for me, really got me hooked. I though I'd try bring in some feedback from someone who hasn't played xenonauts before focusing on the new player experience. So in order of appearance on my notes rather than importance: 1. The cover system isn't really well explained in the tutorials that I saw. I understood it from nu-com as well as reading the shot calculation but the mechanics could use some more explaining - like if you stand at the corner of the building do you get no cover from a 45deg angle? The binary nature of cover could probably use a tweak - the game is pretty lethal as is. Ie. maybe a tall wall (green) would offer partial cover (yellow) to angles, where as a low wall would offer nothing (as is current) to represent a soldier's ability to 'hug' the cover. 2. Friendly fire and when it triggers and doesn't also isn't explained. From trial and error it appears to be when units are next to each other, but then sometimes not when diagonally adjacent and an enemy is at certain angles. 3. When a mission comes up and you get the aircraft screen - launch aircraft actually takes you to the soldier layout. It took awhile to figure this out and the first mission screen I aborted out of to go and do loadouts because I though pressing launch aircraft would send the transport as is. 4. Following from this, when doing loadouts for a mission there doesn't seem to be an easy/intuitive way to bring up the transport layout. An extra button on the UI would be nice. 5. Timed missions absolutely need reminders. 6. Some further intro into the financial ecosystem of the game would be really good when that is finalised. 7. Building/researching basic aircraft weapons and then having to build them individually seems off/clunky. 8. Some colouring or light customisation of soldiers would be really cool. When in heavy armour they're indistinguishable. Options for camo patterns would be awesome. Flags on the soldier UI too is a nice to have. 9. music variety is much needed, I haven't played long and already feeling the loop. 10. Sounds in general could do with some extra love - death sounds could use variety. Gun sounds need some punch to feel violent/deadly. Environment sounds are pretty good actually. 11. Convoy ambush mission text says enemies start with half TUs, but many starting blasting multiple shots (even after small moves) which doesn't seem right. I've enjoyed the early ramp of missions. The VIP extraction mission seems a bit rough just starting in an open courtyard with Cleaners right next to you - some thought into alien spawning for some missions is probably necessary. Still going but wanted to get the first impressions out there!

No. Micro managing your research queue by optimizing scientists between multiple projects to fight diminishing returns does indeed add major depth and interesting choices. It also makes managing research easier and more intuitive to have multiple simultaneous active projects and being able to tweak reasearch personnel freely between them if the situation calls for it or circumstances change unexpectedly .

When I think about it, you're right. The maps in general lack more levels, high building, or even underground levels. More tactical missions have been announced so hopefully in the full version...

There are events, like UFO sightings, journalists being arrested, politicians murdered etc popping out on the geoscape every now and then, which increase the panic in the region they happen. I think it would be great, if a game mechanic would be implemented, that at least some of the missions would trigger an option to send a combat team to investigate (the event would have a timer, so that the player could click on it and either accept to send a combat team or not), gather intelligence or capture the assasin in a tactical mission. Positive outcome could then decrease the panic in the region by a bit (say 5 points or so). Negative outcome or no reaction would keep the raised panic level. Such missions could be of small scale on a small map to not interfere too much with the overal goal of the game, but could give the player a chace to proactively lower the panic levels in a region. On the same note, it would encourage the player to build more bases and recruit more combat teams to have a chance to react to such events. If I am not mistaken, one or two of the event descriptions even said "...local government/forces expect/awaits Xenonaut support" or something with similar meaning. I mean it would be cool to have a chance to react to these call outs on a tactical map (gather evidence/data just like with the cleaner cells or to capture/kill the assasins(s)) or in case of military plane shot down a rescue mission, civil plane down SAR mission to save a VIP from that plane, defend a military base etc.. Those missions would give the player a deeper involvement in the world and create more immersive experiance in my opinion. Any thoughts?

Exactly - what many people remember from the original X-Com are those experiences and the atmosphere. Everyone of my colleagues and friends, who played the original X-Com, first talk about the creepy corn fields at night. And when it comes to X-Com: TFTD it is something like that: "The music + late night playing with no lights + alien base missions + high volume sonic cannon shots and aquanaut screams + tentaculats = the definition of terrifying" It is also the atmosphere and the "experience" that attracts a lot of people when it comes to games; not perfect gameplay mechanisms and balancing down to the smallest detail. It is about how it "feels" to play. The graphical presentation is a part of this: I love the sober mil-sim look of X2, but more darkness and things like fog could greatly increase how the game feels. For example: the alien bases would be much more atmospheric if they would be dark and maybe filled with fog (the alien creatures having their own atmosphere in there). "Darkwood" or "Aliens: Dark Descent" (aka X-Com: Colonial Marines) do it nice, albeit a little bit too much of everything. A more "sober" approach like in X2 would be better. And equally much can be achieved with game features: keeping the enemy creatures as "unknown" as possible (no status messages for the creatures: HP, "suppressed" etc.). A nice little, immersive gadget: a separate "motion sensor" (very atmospheric to have to use it and draw conclusions), presenting a motion sensor with overlay UI (something flashes on the virtual battlefield), on the other hand, is not atmospheric at all. This creates memorable experiences and is immersive/atmospheric ("What moves there in the darkness/inside the barn/house etc.): https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/File:Xenomorphs.png What players often remember most about games, the most memorable experiences, seem to be the "levels"/"missions"/etc. that they had to go through despite being hard (and dark and scary): Everyone talks about the "Tower of Latria" or having to climb down into the "Valley of Defilement" in Demons Souls, or "Blighttown" in Dark Souls. Same for the original X-Com: those atmospheric night missions, going through the cornfields... X2 is a game about alien creatures and the "unknown" (and not something like "Jagged Alliance") - so darkness and creating an overall eerie atmosphere would really fit imho.

The HEVY's effective range is barely longer than a 70 strength soldier can throw a grenade. One of the reasons to have a grenade launcher is so you can shoot explosive or smoke grenades at a significantly farther distance than a human could just throw. The main downside should really only be that you can't arc the HEVY's projectile over close by terrain like how you can toss a grenade over a wall you're next to. I'd suggest that a soldier with maxed out strength should probably still not be able to compare with the HEVY in terms of sheer distance. Otherwise, it feels slightly not worthwhile to load a soldier down with that when you can just give them a regular rifle and some hand grenades.

Just speaking personally of course, but I wouldn't like to see night missions made easier by having circumstances that benefit the player. Part of the fear-factor comes from knowing that you're really up against it! I have a simple answer to the question of why would people choose to do night missions, which is to make all Terror, Abduction, and Alien Base missions be night missions. And inside UFOs too. They should be the scariest missions anyway, right? The issue here, as I see it, is that those missions -- well, Terror or Abduction at least -- could only be on the geoscape for a maximum of 12 hours, which is of course too limiting. I've been thinking about this today, and have what is (in my mind at least!) a neat solution. For Terror and Abduction missions, the aliens cover the area in a fog-like miasma of nano-particles (or whatever ). This is basically a way of creating night conditions even if the mission is encountered during the day. It fits the Abduction mission really well because the aliens want to keep their antics away from prying eyes, and Terror because it makes things, well, terrifying! This idea opens up more possibilities. Maybe the fog is weaponised to instil fear in humans (a bit like a milder version of the Scarecrow's toxins from Batman). This fits thematically, especially for Terror missions. So, any Xenonauts in this dark fog suffer a penalty to their bravery and are more likely to panic. Maybe the fog is neutralised by photons of light, so soliders can rally themselves by sticking to well-lit areas. Perhaps the effect is cumulative, and the longer a solider is in the dark, the lower their bravery gets. End their turn in some light to restore bravery. The current morale system is pretty barebones, so this could spice it up. Other night factors can include an accuracy penalty to shooting aliens in the dark, which could lead to a strategy of wanting the illuminate them with flares before attacking. There could be more equipment tailored to these "night" missions too, such as night vision goggles, anti-miasma torches, adrenaline shots to counter the bravery-sapping effect (synthesised from Reapers maybe?) Making it an alien-generated effect rather than just natural nighttime opens up a lot of possibilities, as you can basically give it any properties you like. Wouldn't it be cool if UFOs and alien bases followed this ruleset too? It could be like a defence mechanism activated by the aliens. It'd make them a lot scarier, for you the commander and for your troops as well. Maybe there's potential in tying Mantids into this, as they're currently a bit dull as enemies. Perhaps they generally excel in these conditions, as it mirrors their natural environment, so get buffs to their stats. For a special ability they could belch out concentrated miasma, making soldiers panic and creating a smoke effect. Capture a live specimen to unlock Panic Grenades, which have a big impact on an enemy's bravery. And it would be a great reason to have the kind of awesome lighting effects that a modern game engine allows! Lots of ideas, hopefully some good ones are in there somewhere

@Chris Not sure if its asked before, but would it be possible to mod multi-tile units in X2? Some of us still liked the mini-tanks from the previous game.

I miss the really dark nights of XCOM. Like so dark it was hard to make out what was happening. So atmospheric. I'm hoping the visuals really get a good pass late beta. It's obviously something that can be done at any point, but some of the concept art for Xenonauts 2 was simply stunning, great lighting and shadows, and adding that back in would make night so much more atmospheric. I really liked sighting an alien and trying to work out what it was from its outline too. That just felt "shit what's out there". Obviously night missions in XCOM were quite manageable, but there was always this primal dread of them. With a modern lighting engine like Unity it could be amazing - little pools of streetlights and lamps illuminating the dark, flares thrown out and casting a dim orange illumination over a small area, etc. Feel like a really good visual update would make night missions work more than mechanical adjustments - most of the ways they don't "work" for me right now are really flavor related. Also all the troops should automatically stock 2 flares, and more should take up inventory space. 18 flares would cover most maps anyway.

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! Gameplay / Balance Changes: It is now possible to redirect aircraft squadrons that are already in flight via the Launch Aircraft panel (this also allows you to split aircraft out of airborne squadrons). Updated the AI so it will only perform attacks on units that an alien unit has seen that turn, as it was apparently previously ignoring the vision rules. This could lead to some rather unfair situations where enemies were shooting beyond vision range or throwing grenades over walls at units they had never seen. Cleaner units reduced in Accuracy from 65 down to 55 for the suited guys (Agents) and 60 for the hazmat guys (Soldiers). Accuracy for enemies on Recruit difficulty has been dropped from 85% of normal values down to 80% of normal values. Stun Gun has been buffed a little - it now does slightly more Stun Damage, has improved accuracy and holds 4 shots rather than 3. UFO Armour and Health are now shown at maximum zoom level in the air combat. Updated a number of translation languages files to incorporate various changes and fixes. Bugfixes: Fixed a couple of memory leaks that triggered each time you saved the game. Fixed players being unable to demolish base structures. Actually fixed the Geoscape multi-select dialog revealing hidden missions like the Cleaner Base. Fixed the opening cutscene and several buttons on the tactical UI ignoring the settings volume sliders. Fixed units being able to shoot through floor tiles in the Alien Base maps if they had taken damage. Fixed a calculation issue that was causing the game to generate female soldiers at a higher rate than intended. Fixed aircraft callsigns repeating before all available names had been exhausted. Fixed "War Machine" achievement triggering off the Exosuit, rather than the Colossus (which isn't yet in the game). Fixed one of the barn window types not correctly shattering. Achievements are now disabled during the tutorial. Servitor Wreckage is no longer incorrectly called Gun Drone Wreckage. Fixed various hitbox issues around the edges of the Geoscape regions so they now better match the highlighted areas.

Alright, I'm gonna say it. I don't think you should be able to make stuff and sell it for a profit in Xenonauts. I think you should only make money in shooting aliens and matters related to shooting aliens, like selling UFO loot and having your funding countries be happy with the locations and styles in which you shoot aliens.

I think others have said this before, but I want to repeat that the knife really needs a weight decrease I think. While I find the idea hilarious to bayonet-charge at advanced aliens really hilarious, the weight-cost is far too high considering it goes in the secondary slot instead of a medi-kit or a pistol. Personally I don't mind going to the storage menu and sell things when I need the cash, in some primitive caveman way it is satisfying to me to actually hit buttons and the "you sell alien kidneys to shady dudes for cash and can afford stuff! again"-counter goes up with each click, it kinda makes loot feel more "real" to me beyond the pure cash increase. To be fair, I am trying to think of a reason get they money right away but I can't think of one, maybe they are considering making loot into crafting materials, e.g. spend engineering time to bypass the DNA lock of an alien rifle, grind up Reptilians into health-goo-injection-kits or something? That being said I am not sure I would like loot-based crafting, because the alien types you fight are random and if you are unlucky you will not get the corpses you need. But yeah kinda odd at the moment that there isn't even any indication if you can sell something safely or not.