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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...

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

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

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!

November is nearly over so it's once again time for our monthly dev update. We've had a productive month here overall, making numerous improvements to the game and adding in several new features too. Public Releases: We continued patching V24 this month, eventually releasing V24.7b onto the standard Steam / GOG branches. We got a lot of useful feedback on balancing from the community and I'm actively playtesting V25 at the moment with the intention of releasing it either later this week or some time next week. V25 is going to be our first open beta build, although it'll spend a few days with our existing community beforehand so we can find any critical bugs in it before we begin the open beta. The first (small) wave of invites will probably therefore be going out in mid-December. Alien Abilities: The biggest new feature we implemented this month were the remaining alien racial abilities. These are a bit more "active" compared to the alien powers in the first Xenonauts, with the idea being to pose interesting tactical challenges for the player. I'll give a couple of examples to show you what I mean. The first is the Wraith, which in Xenonauts 1 could teleport around the map (not particularly funny when you were trying to find the last alien in an alien base, etc). Now they instead have an ability called Cloaking Field, which reduces Accuracy by -2 for each tile of distance when shooting at a Wraith. However, Cloaking Field is disabled for the remainder of the turn when the Wraith takes damage from any source. The second is the Cyberdrone, which is a late-game alien unit which has heavy frontal armour and rotates in the direction of any sound - gunshots, footsteps, explosions, etc. Using multiple soldiers (or just throwing grenades behind it) allow you to expose the weaker rear armour and can make it easier to kill. Hopefully this illustrates what we're trying to achieve - basically to make the player think more closely about where to position their soldiers and what attacks or equipment to use. While these abilities still require quite a lot more testing and polishing, once we have them working properly the gameplay will hopefully be richer and the aliens more memorable. Soldier Equipment: In V24 soldiers have an equipment slot called the "special" slot (also known as the "undersuit" slot). This is basically an additional item slot where you can carry one item that gives the soldier a particular bonus - e.g. extra armour plates to boost survivability, a tactical visor to boost Accuracy, a mind shield to boost defence against psionics, etc. As this system hasn't added as many interesting choices to the game as I'd have liked, I've spent this month updating the soldier inventory. Soldiers now have a Primary weapon, a Secondary weapon, and a single 5x5 "vest" grid which contains all the additional items they want to carry into battle (ammo, grenades, extra weapons, etc). Importantly, all the items that previously went in the special slot are now 2x2 items that fit into the vest grid like any other item. I've been playtesting this over the past few days and I think it's a really fun change. The backpack wasn't really being used that much before, but now vest space (and the carrying capacity of the soldier) are much more important, even at the start of the game. Is it worth giving up that spare ammo magazine and two grenades for +5 Accuracy? It all depends on how you want to set up your soldiers, and it's a system I'm looking forward to discussing and balancing further during the open beta. General Development Progress: Other than my work on the two systems mentioned above, most of my time this month has been spent discussing the gameplay experience with our community and ironing out various smaller gameplay / usability pain points in the campaign. General feedback on V24 was pretty good but there's clearly quite a few aspects of the game that are interfering with people's enjoyment of it; many of these should be improved in V25. There's been several content updates to the game, too - the Engineering screen has now been re-skinned into our new UI style, the updated Arid biome is now present (with eight entirely new maps), and the dropships have been retextured in the tatical combat. We've also been busy planning out the tutorial and creating the map required for it, and we'll start work implementing that in December. Finally, we've been working on the load times for the game, and have hopefully now fixed the issue where Windows would think the game had frozen and invite you to terminate the process if you had alt+tabbed out while the game was loading. So overall a rather productive month. I'll wrap up this update there, and hopefully we'll be seeing some of you in the open beta during December! If you want to sign up for the open beta, please post in the previous update thread. I'll be DMing people Steam keys via these forums when the open beta starts.

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.

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

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

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

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 never found a good use of the grenade launcher in X2, considering that I already had the satchel charges for breaching entry and the MARs to smash past walls as a cheaper alternative. I used it to reveal enemies from buildings and break obstacles, but the inaccuracy fails in that area. As a direct fire weapon it deals considerably worse damage than grenades, and its range is terrible, leaving its utility questionable. I would like to know if anyone else finds the grenadier role effective in their game. Also, its the only weapon that does not scale with the soldier's Turn units(stays at 24/34 TU)? Is that a feature or a bug? I played GOG v1.19 for reference The rocket launcher in Xenonauts 1 served as a long-range can opener, able to deal explosive destruction from afar with the drawbacks of a single shot. I wonder why its replaced by this?

It's very frustrating how civilians act in a totally random way, getting themselves constantly shot and running always from safety into danger. It would be great if your troops could "Evac" unarmed civilians by interacting at close range with them, at which point instead of their current wandering they'll run towards the dropship and hide next to it (Instead of into alien machineguns)

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.

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 Changes: 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. Cleaner SMGs and Cleaner Accelerated Rifles are now recoverable and usable (by popular demand). Xenonaut Sentry Guns can now open doors, but are unable to crush objects. 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. Reduced the spawn rate of Cleaner anomalies at the start of the game. Key Fixes: Fixed a pathfinding crash that had been introduced in 1.26, which usually crashed during the AI turn but also could affect the player. 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 occur on the Soldier Recruitment panel due to a corrupted Kickstarter backer soldier. 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. General Fixes: Fixed grenades / aircraft missiles not properly upgrading if you skip the Alenium project and go straight for Fusion. 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. 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. 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.

Ignore that idiot Alienkiller. Soldiers increase by surviving missions and/or getting kills. Here is the official wiki. https://hoodedhorse.com/wiki/Xenonauts_2/Xenonauts_2_Official_Wiki There is also the "Archives" you see on the main menu. Goodluck Commander!

I was going to complain that you are ugly and your mother dresses you funny but that wouldn't help the game become more immersive.

In a game with aliens with human DNA, plasma weapons, paradox-free faster-than-light travel, and combat where the involved soldiers patiently wait their turn while their enemies run around, THIS is your complaint?

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

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

Milestone 1 Experimental has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch (unless you're part of our Steam Playtest, in which case you don't have to change branches at all!) so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). If you want to continue your previous playthrough on V27, please switch to the Experimental Legacy branch. As the name implies, this build will eventually become our Early Access launch build. I believe our publishers are announcing our Early Access launch date on Monday next week, so keep your eyes out for that if you don't already own the game! Anyway, this build isn't yet finished and we'll continue to patch in content (notably updated writing, some new research art, and hopefully a few new maps for the Cleaner missions) as we approach Early Access. As usual, we'll also be working hard on fixing any bugs that people find. If you do play the game, we'd also appreciate general gameplay feedback on the difficulty curve in the Milestone 1 Balance Thread. Right now it's hard to know if people aren't talking about the balance much because the difficulty curve is pretty good, or because they're just not posting feedback. There's still time to tweak the numbers to smooth out any issues in the difficulty curve prior to our Early Access launch. Summary: Game Cut-Off: the game now cuts off after 180 days. We've done this to keep the amount of content we need to polish for the Early Access launch to a manageable amount, and the remaining content will be added back in Early Access once it's been polished to a similar standard (if you really want to play it before then, V27 is available on the legacy branches and doesn't have this cap). UFO speeds: UFOs will now change speed at semi-random intervals when flying around on the Geoscape. This means it's no longer binary whether an interceptor can catch a UFO or not; in general I've made the Angel less reliable at catching Observers and later UFOs but it still has a chance of doing so. Targeting Modes: we've added a new targetting mode for grenades and medikits which snaps to tiles, rather than whatever 3D object is under the mouse. This should make it much easier to target the intended object with these weapons. Memory Leak fixes: we've fixed a number of memory leaks in the game, which should improve performance in long play sessions. Xenopedia Updates: the entire tech tree for the playable 180 days will have research text when we launch into Early Access. I've made a decent start on this already but we'll continue to patch it in as we do hotfixes. Translation: we're still waiting for some words to come back from our translators, but next week we should be able to patch in the updated translation files so people can experience the game in German, Spanish, French, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian or Chinese. Control Changes: Strategy - on the Aircraft screen, you can now rotate soldiers while you arrange them in the dropship. RMB click will rotate a soldier 90 degrees, and you can use Q/E to rotate soldiers 90 degrees in a particular direction. Strategy - quantity arrows in various places (stores screen, hiring scientists / engineers, etc) now support RMB / Ctrl+Click to add 10 and max quantity respectively. You can also click the number itself and enter a quantity. Strategy - on the Soldier Equip screen, RMB clicking a soldier in the soldier list will unassign them from the dropship. Ground Combat - RMB clicking now deselects grenade throw mode if you have it active. Changelog - Strategy A few minor tweaks to the tech tree. Stealth Armour is now unlocked a tier earlier, coming off Alien Electronics in the Observer. It now has less Armour as a result. Also, there's now an engineering upgrade project for the Medical Center that is unlocked from the Tissue Regeneration project. By default the game is now muted when it's not selected (which only happens if you're playing in a window). You can disable this in the options if you want. Base structures can no longer be disabled, as this didn't have much functionality and means we can make the Power system less irritating and fussy. Interceptor squadrons now display a unique icon for each aircraft present in the squadron. If a UFO is detected by the Quantum Decoder, the crash site now also displays the species of the UFO. Attribute tooltips on the Soldier Equip screen now provide both a description of the stat, and show any modifiers affecting the current soldier. If you try to launch an empty dropship at a mission site, it now takes you to the Soldier Equip screen and lets you assign more soldiers rather than blocking the launch. The sort order on Soldier screen has been updated, so soldiers who cannot be used because they are wounded or in transit are sorted to the bottom of the list. Fixed some issues where units with lots of kills could get more than the +2 attribute cap after a battle. Fixed issues in Geoscape base placement when you scroll the map left / right and part of the radar preview circles disappear. Fixed a minor issue with AC aircraft labels flickering when in motion Fixed an issue where AC missiles were not making an impact sound. Changelog - Tactical Combat Cleaner Soldiers (the guys with gas masks) no longer spawn in Cleaner Cells, which makes the missions a bit easier. They only appear as reinforcements. Weapons that can take multiple ammo types (e.g. HEVY) now show their loaded ammo type in the tactical UI. Stun damage is now shown as a small yellow line on the HP bar on the soldier minitabs at the top of the screen. Reloading a weapon no longer changes the order of the fire mode tiles in the tactical UI. If the currently selected soldier in tactical combat is killed during the enemy turn, the game now selects a new soldier at the start of the player turn. The gibbed corpse items of gibbed units no longer still recover the corresponding undamaged corpse at the end of battle. Cleaner Data items now only cost 1TU to pick up from the ground, rather than 10TU. Fixed Servitors bringing dead aliens back to life with their healing ray. Fixed force fire mode being "sticky" rather than correctly responding to the key being held. Fixed grenades clipping the edges of buildings / cliffs even when they display a 100% hit chance. Fixed an issue where throwing a grenade at a mutli-tile object could sometimes allow the grenade to pass right through it. Fixed items dropped on the ground not displaying their item model after loading a save. Fixed explosives that inflict no damage (e.g. smoke grenades) destroying items that have been dropped on the ground. Fixed an issue where it was possible to drop below 0TU if you loaded your soldier with absurd amounts of gear on the strategy layer. This prevented the soldier from dropping any of the gear on the tactical layer, causing them to be stuck. Fixed an issue where the TU cost for moving an item in the inventory could get zeroed out if you moved it twice.

One of my favorite moments so far playing X2, was when a farmer with a shotgun charged into a downed alien ship (a Destroyer or Cruiser I think) and managed to blow his way through the defenders and reach the command room before getting gunned down. Absolute Mad-Lad and I hope I can still see things like that in the future hahahaha! Never posted on the forum before but much love and support to you and the team for sticking through with the development of this!

Closed Beta Build V26 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch (unless you're part of our Steam Playtest, in which case you don't have to change branches at all!) so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). This is a major update for the game that includes a lot of changes, both in terms of new content and updated balance. The changelog isn't comprehensive, particularly with regards to the balance changes! We're planning to start locking down the game to new features in preparation for Early Access now, and we'll be concentrating on bugfixes, adding new art / writing to the research tree, and creating some new levels. I'll also be making balance tweaks as required, but nothing transformative. Please let us know if you encounter any bugs in the game. There's quite a few known bugs in the tactical combat we're aware of but just haven't had time to fix yet, so I've provided a list of known bugs at the bottom of this thread - there's no need to report these bugs if you do see them. Summary: Campaign Difficulty Options: when you start a new campaign, you are now presented with a large number of options that show what each difficulty setting is changing. You can also change these manually to make your own custom difficulty setting if you want. VETERAN DIFFICULTY NOW DISABLES THINGS - e.g. units no longer show their HP above their heads, it costs TU to rotate while firing weapons, etc. It's therefore much more of a "classic" (and much more difficult) experience than Soldier difficulty. Updated Soldier Equip & Aircraft Screens: these two Geoscape screens have been restyled in their final look, along with all their child screens (like create new loadout etc). There's also been a significant number of usability changes on both screens. Cleaner Network: the Cleaner missions have changed, and are no longer linked to research. The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now spawns automatically about a week into the campaign, and once that is complete the Cleaner Network progress bar is shown. Once this reaches 100%, the Cleaner Base is revealed and can be attacked, which ends all Cleaner activity if successful. However at 100% all Cleaner activity also inflicts 50% reduced Panic so it's worth revealing the Base as quickly as possible even if you don't launch the mission straight away. You get +1% progress per day passively once the Cleaner Intel Hub is completed, but each Cleaner Data item recovered from the Intel Hub or the new Cleaner Cell missions will provide +2% progress each. Capturing the VIP alive at a Cleaner Cell provides +15% progress. Cleaner Cells: these are three optional missions unlocked as soon as the Intel Hub mission is completed. They are elimination missions where the objective is simply to kill the VIP and then return to your dropship, grabbing as much Cleaner Data as possible on the way. Destroying a Cell will permanently stop Cleaner activity in the two linked funding regions. Each of the three Cells has a unique buff - either the enemies have more powerful weapons, are better armoured, or are backed up by Sentry Guns. The Cleaner Base has all three of these buffs, but destroying the corresponding Cell will remove that buff from the Cleaner Base. Conversations & Text: I've added a number of character conversations in the early part of the game, and reworked some research text as the result of tech tree changes. I'll be adding more of both as we release the hotfixes for V27. Changelog - Strategy: General - the tech tree has been reworked quite heavily again. General - Autopsies and UFO datacore research projects now go straight into the Xenopedia without being displayed. This is mostly to prevent the player being spammed with too many popups after a mission. General - added a number of new buttons to the Main Menu that link to our social media channels and what will become the game's wiki (feel free to start filling this in if you want). General - Cleaner activity now comes in the form of anomalies, rather than just being a monthly popup. Early game anomalies are generally more subtle to fit the "secret war" theme. General - added the Smoke Launcher back into the MARS. General - weapons with ammo regeneration (e.g. Advanced Lasers) now display this on the tooltip. General - fixed the mission debrief "Aliens Killed" line not including captured aliens, which was confusing people. General - fixed various visual issues with the UI on 21:9 screens. Main Base - demolishing a building on the Main Base screen now lists the amount of money to be refunded. Engineering - projects that can only be built once now display "Unique" in their quantity field. Soldier Equip - the soldier category tabs now all have icons (with unique icons per dropship type), and all display the number of soldiers there. Soldier Equip - there's now an Auto-Fill Dropship button that means you don't manually need to assign soldiers to all empty slots. Soldier Equip - display the soldier HP in brackets after their name if not at full health. Soldier Equip - closing the Create New Loadout panel can now be done with Esc, and no longer creates the new loadout anyway. Soldier Equip - Armour attachments (like the Jetpack) now show the appropriate tooltip on hover over the button on Soldier Equip screen. Aircraft - on the dropship panel, right clicking any soldier in the list will remove them from the dropship. Left-clicking an empty slot will open the soldier assignment panel. Bugfix- you can no longer avoid a base defence mission entirely just by pressing Esc to close the "Your base is under attack!" popup. Bugfix- Cleaner Base mission can no longer be targetted by alien Resupply missions. Bugfix - fixed Strength modifiers not correctly updating the carrying capacity of the soldier. Bugfix - fixed the Recruit Soldier panel reversing the sort order every time you clicked a new heading or recruited a soldier. Bugfix - fixed the base defence turret damage seemingly not being randomised correctly. Bugfix - fixed the Base Defence squad not allowing you to assign soldiers to it in some circumstances. Bugfix - fixed a bug where items being transferred to a base would appear on the Soldier Equip screen, but then not be interactive. Bugfix - fixed various bugs with the Sentry Gun and its equipment. Changelog - Air Combat: Air Combat default speed is now setting 2, with setting 1 now being half speed. Air combat deployment area is now the frontal 180 degree arc of the UFO, rather than a full circle. Aircraft Armour is no longer instantly healed after combat, but is repaired back at base like HP. Bugfix - UI toggles like Retreat / Afterburners now visually toggle on correctly if you activate them via hotkey. Bugfix - missiles in air combat no longer sometimes hit their target instantly, rather than having to fly over to it. Bugfix - weapons in air combat (particularly missiles) no longer sometimes fire at the wrong target. Changelog - Tactical Combat: Combat shields have been updated to work like they did in Xenonauts 1. However, the shield on the Cyberdrone has not changed and still provides a directional Armour boost rather than a HP boost. Injured soldiers can now be sent into battle again, provided they are over 50% health. The Hidden Movement screen has been hidden by to popular request. Flashbangs no longer suppress through floors / roofs. Improved the pathfinding so it should reliably choose the optimal route to a location. The "Suppressed" label is no longer shown if the suppressing shot kills the affected unit. UFO doors now autoclose at the start of the turn before line of sight is updated, so you should no longer be given vision on enemies inside the UFO behind the closed doors. The camera is now locked during the enemy turn. If you're playing in a window, the camera should no longer move once you click onto another application. Weapons that are not loaded with ammo now display an empty ammo counter and their fire modes, so it's more obvious what the issue is. We now display an explanatory pop-up the first time a unit takes Stun Damage, falls unconscious, drops and objective item, and on the first night mission. There's now a visual indicator in the topbar for unconscious soldiers (so it's obvious they're not dead). Rotating towards a target is now allowed if a unit is berserking. The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now accounts for unconscious soldiers when deciding whether to automatically end the mission on successful completion. Moving items around in a soldier's inventory will no longer be free if the soldier is moving. Fixed an issue where a ring of tiles at the tops of cliffs would sometimes not appear revealed. UFO Power Core explosion on destruction is no longer quite so large. Inventory items destroyed by explosions no longer show an undamaged 3D model on the ground. Obstruction shading for neutral units like civilians is now in white rather than green. Added some new Portacabin tiles for the dockyard. Added destruction states for various terrain objects. Bugfix - fixed the annoying looping sound issue that could be triggered by hovering units. Thanks to everyone who helped us track that down! Bugfix - fixed a bug where Xenonauts outside the evacuation area could survive a mission where they were left behind. Bugfix - the Battleship UFO's hull should no longer be transparent in some circumstances. Known Bugs (which you don't need to report if encountered): There's a known memory leak in the game, which means you'll need to restart the game every couple of hours to avoid performance issues. Grenades can sometimes hit the edges of cliffs / roofs / shipping containers even when showing 100% hit chance. UFO interior is occasionally revealed in the shroud on night missions. Soldiers often contort / rotate strangely when firing weapons at very short range. The radar rings can disappear entirely when placing a new base if you scroll the Geoscape too far left or right. Blood puddles are not being hidden when you change camera level. It's not possible to crush a prop using the MARS by moving onto it, you instead have to move through it onto a free tile on the other side. The currently selected soldier will remain selected even if you end the turn and then they are killed during the alien turn. Reloading a weapon will re-order the weapon fire modes in the UI.

March is nearly over and it's time for our monthly update. We've still not nailed down a definite date for our Early Access launch but barring any major disaster we're planning to stick to our Q2 target window, so we're an absolute maximum of three months away from launch at this point. Campaign Options: One of the two big features we've worked on this month are campaign options, which take the form of a new panel alongside the New Campaign menu. The values for these options update as you change difficulty settings, allowing players to better understand how each difficulty setting changes the game. However, you can also change the values manually and create your own custom difficulty setting - for example, if you found the strategy layer fairly easy but wanted to make the tactical combat harder. We've also included new options (both on this panel and in the standard settings menu) that allow you to enable or disable several of the quality of life features or gameplay changes we've made in Xenonauts 2 - for example, some people like enemies displaying their heath values above their heads, whereas others do not. This also applies to things like the camera automatically focusing on newly detected enemies or whether soldier rotation when firing weapons should cost Time Units. Regular beta players should note that we've now tied some of these usability changes to difficulty level. If you're playing on the harder difficulty settings then you'll no longer see the enemy healthbars (unless you manually choose to enable them) and rotation when firing weapons does now cost Time Units by default, etc. Please bear this in mind when reporting bugs in future! Translation: The other big feature we've worked on this month is the technical implementation of translation, which has involved finding literally every text string displayed in the game and exporting it into a massive spreadsheet so it can be translated. There's many thousands of these (many of which are dynamic strings rather than static ones), so it's been a lot of work and has caused quite a few bugs. However we're now pretty close to being done with this, and we'll hopefully be doing a dry run of the tech next week with the localisation teams from our marketing partners. If that goes well then we'll be sending the text off to the professional translators afterwards. This is the main reason why I've not been comfortable setting a date for Early Access quite yet - I really wouldn't be surprised if at least one unexpected problem arises from the translation testing that derails general development for a week or more, so I don't want to be working to a hard deadline until the dry run is complete and we've fixed any major problems that were identified as a result. Other Work: Another improvement that happened this month is the Aircraft screen and all associated panels being reskinned. This was the last of the strategy management screens that required a visual revamp, so now the only parts of the game that still need a UI pass are the Geoscape map itself and the Air Combat. Quite a nice mini-milestone for us! More recently I've also been working hard on the strategy balance and trying to improve the air combat a bit. Now the campaign options are finished and hopefully translation is too, we're turning our attention back to V27 and hopefully we'll get that out about two weeks from now. That's all I've got for now - see you all next month!

I just finished making a document with lots of data for how many shots a shield user can take as opposed to a normal soldier with no shield. This is tangentially related to my other topic I made the other day about making shields have a better "game feel". This document is free for anyone to use and it has no conclusion in it, so anyone reading it can come to their own conclusions. I made a lot of assumptions and my equation for my data is potentially very wrong. I also only took into account enemy weapons up to the Alien Mag-Rifle, soldier armors up to Guardian armor, and only used the default shield as I don't have the stats of any of the equipment past those. If anyone knows the stats of any equipment past the ones I have, then feel free to tell me the damage, armor penetration, and armor destruction of the weapons and tell more the armor of the armors and advanced shield. If I made a significant math error as well, feel free to shoot me a message here or on the Xenonauts 2 discord. I hope this might make discussions more about the hard math more than the shields just "feeling" bad to use, so the balance issue of shields can be addressed much more easily. And before anyone says, I know I put way to much effort into this for something that might not be used at all. But I'm proud of it, so that's the thing that matters the most. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p4Vfc1unY_59aSDWYPETrUEthFNrvfeh_hlbXt0fSXQ/edit?usp=sharing

No, not the video app. I posted a request for some zoom-in to see the action more clearly/add drama in February of 2020. A year later, I posted this & got the response below from Chris: ---------------------------------- "Posted February 28, 2021 One year ago I asked about being able to zoom in a bit closer during ground combat.... Chris replied: "Yeah, it's relatively easy to support this - it's just a camera setting. It'll probably be a day or so of work to set up the different view levels on the camera and the logic that remembers which one you have selected between missions etc,...If you ask me again in a few months we might put it in the game then " ------------------------------ So here I am to add my voice once again to the other requests for a zoom--three years after the first one. Note that Chris estimated a "day or so" of coding to set it up, although that seemed/seems optimistic. At this point, a zoom would probably add the most visual enjoyment to the game for me, and I do see others mentioning it.

Surprisingly, I have to agree with Solver on this one. Nothing is more fun killing than knowing exactly what the map is going to be like, and with that you dont really need to pay attention anymore, and that lessens the fun. During the development process of X-Division we took on what needed work the most, and for maps it was the terror missions. Because we added so much aliens the relatively small terror maps felt more cramped than usual. One of the things the team did was create different leveled versions of the same building. Eg: Additionally we simply alternated the vanilla layout. That was a very easy copy and paste job, as we simply copied one level as textdata and pasted it one level higher. Given that terror missions are quite hard, the added variety felt like a good reward for taking on a difficult mission. Keep in mind though that we also forbid the aliens from starting inside of a building, vanilla does not contain any spawn points on higher levels, and the more aggressive AI meant that the player never really had to search for the aliens (thus we also removed the reveal after 20 turns mechanic, and later added it with 40 turns back in again). However we could do better. All of this is based on illunaks contribution of allowing submaps to load other submaps. This technical aspect alone makes a lot possible. Want to make an asset which contains all other boxes ? We can do that. Want to make another asset that loads said box mix with 20% possibility ? Just put and add 2 of the box mix as a file, and 8 empty ones. I am familiar with all the map packs and how they work (mostly) and its not an understatement to say that without the lovely added chaotic and unpredictable maps X-Division would have never come to be. Before people would add additional unit content if no map variety would have been present the gameplay loop would have quickly burned out. Nothings more fun killing than "Been there, done that, seen everything". Imagine playing 200 hours of X-Division on the vanilla maps only, and you will see how much core the mapping scene is to the modding community. Unfortunately, Illunaks contributions came way too late. By the time the functionality was added, all the other maps had already been written, and no map content which utilises this system has been published today. The mapmakers moved on, and thats just that. It came around that that somebody actually implemented this system, and improved on other aspects of vanilla maps too, focusing on the battleship map. Here is showcase of how that could look like: More images of actual implemented variations can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bY-FRNoOYGcEpiQ4ILPaWGlFoagedOtU/view?usp=share_link Here i talk roughly 2 hours about proper game design and explain the ins and outs of the system specifically for maps. And the presented idea visualised in a CAD: This was all done with the functionality that XCE and Illunak provided and is already possible in X1. Now this shouldnt be an argument because it is possible in X1 it should be possible in X2, just showing that the concept removed from the implementation works. Put to the test the procedural generation of battleship maps increased the loading time by 50%. That sounds long, but if you realise you will play at least an hour on such a map its usually worth it. However as Solver once noted, the increased loading time fundamentally shows that something wrong happens in that system, and it should really not take more than 300 ms between a procedurally and non procedurally map generated. Performance is still a factor, and the faster a map loads the happier the players are, as you break immersion less with lower loading times. However, the system will have to be build with procedurally generated content in mind, otherwise you will just end up with scaling issues like in X1. I strongly advise follwoing points: Hire somebody that actually cares about procedurally generated maps. Whether you like it or not, randomised maps are THE factor for the longevity of a game, and a healthy modding scene. Just take a look at Wacraft 3, the public map editor kept the game alive until the game company literally killed its own modding scene, and spawned entirely new genres, like DOTA. Some programmers just really dont like to do procedurally generated maps, others do. If you cant do it yourself, hire somebody who cares for randomised maps. You will have the highest return on gains on this. Make a public map editor available on day 1. Before anything else can happen for a game, there need to be maps. That means before any other modding can happen, you need the possibility to increase the map variety by the community. Just like Illunaks technical achievements were unmatched, as unmatched was the lack of actual modders who used it. By September 2015 the community scene mostly moved on to other things. So that people feel attracted to the vanilla game, and the modding scene, you need a public map editor. The more map variety there is on day 1, and/or the possibility to make their own, the longer you will attract players. The longer you attract players, the higher the chance for them to buy the next game, the higher the chance they really like your content, and the higher the chance they will start to add to the modding community. Because people WILL move on, the question of it is just "when". Providing a bigger variety increases the time window people spend on your creative content, and therefore increase the time window you can paint yourself in a positive light. All of this is a statement about the biggest bang for the buck that the IP can get, not necessarily how possible it is to achieve it. I have not been filled in about the details of the legal issues for a public map editor, or the situation GI is in. But again i have to stress that the least amount of effort is required to implement the system I presented. The modularity of the system is fully accessible, how much effort the map creator spends on any particular asset is a free choice, assets can be reused on other maps ( additional to the "one map, different biomes" idea), and the gain of the system is exponential. By creating only 36 small submaps you can create 5 figure variations of meaningful and good looking maps. Sincerely, Charon PS: I had to chuckle at @Komandos post again, he put it, as other people would say "most expertly", in very few words. PPS: I do love handcrafted maps, but as Solver said, simply turning an asset in all 4 directions can provide immense value, with little to no effort. As a matter of fact most 4x variations i produced are the same asset rotated in 4 directions.

This is a personal design choice of course but I really disagree with this one. Map variety (the lack thereof) was one of the biggest issues in X1 as originally released. It's a major issue in X2 now, even though more maps will surely come. But even now in X2 (and I haven't played that much), I know what the entire map is like on turn 1. Oh, terror mission and I walk out in front of a gas station? Okay, that's the one with a restaurant on the next block and the roof of the grocery store that offers great firing lines. Woods map with one car in front and a workshop to the right of the dropship? That's the lumber yard map, trains up in the corner provide good cover and another workshop building on the opposite end is tricky to clear. X1 was the same initially, I knew the farm and industrial maps like the back of my hand. The problem with hand-crafted maps is that they take a lot of time to create and you need many to get the replay value up. Xcom-style games are very replayable but that replayability requires map variety. And it's not easily addressed by adding another two maps per biome, you need an extra dozen maps per biome to make any difference. To me, the possibility of "every building is an office" sounds great! Why couldn't I have one fight in a dense office tower district? I would consider the solution that X:CE adopted. In X:CE, there are the base game maps, the wonderful community-created static maps, but also random (actually procedural) maps. The key being, random maps are only picked when there are no other maps to choose from, there's also a repeat-tracking system (it's actually a bit probabilistic IIRC but that's details). With that, map repetition is not a thing in X:CE, you're very unlikely to encounter any repeats within a single campaign. Procedural forest/desert/arctic maps work wonderfully. Yes, the procedural maps can suffer from illogical placement in urban areas and it's visible with examples like a gas station with no entrance as you mention. But I find that to be a far, far lesser violation of my immersion than heading to the third terror mission in the same city block, where I blow up the same gas station again before turning to aliens in the same diner as last time. By the way, Firaxis learned this as well. Their first Xcom had static maps, which may have had a minimal degree of randomization with how cover was placed. That was consistently pointed out as one of the game's main weaknesses. Their Xcom 2 went for procedural generation, and that was very well received despite the occasional weird placement of stuff.

This is a thread we can post small issues that don't warrant a bug report and are more of a small nit picks and things that might need some polish. One issue per post No discussion

It astonishes me every time I shot down a UFO, that it lands in perfect condition with just a few scratches on the hull. What I believe would be a cool addition to mission variety, is adding models of partially destroyed UFOs and creating tactical maps with trails on the ground behind the UFO, impact craters, fires around the crashed UFO, buidings destroyed by impacts of parts of the UFO etc... Depending on the weaponry used to shoot down the UFO, it would suffer various degree of catastrophic damage, while main hull would be intact (could be broken into multiple parts in case of late game weaponry usage) On the map of the crash site, there could be large fires near the crash-site, smoke, buidings destroyed by impacts of the fragments etc, which could be laying around the main hull (engines, turrets, hull plates) and useful as cover Some UFOs could be destroyed in mid air but the crews managed to bail out in the escape pods just before impact, so only escape pods (and UFO wreckage) would be on the map in different locations (cities, forests, fields, roads, lakes, farms etc) with various numbers of surviving aliens. Also there could be a probability of Cleaners trying to rescue the alien survivors, the higher, the longer it would take the player to send a squad to secure the UFO crash site (usually the timer is about 3 days, so on day 1 25%, day 2 50%, day 3 75% probability to meet a cleaner rescue team) This would give a big variety to tactical scenarios and missions in my opinion.

Some of the concepts described below I have seen in an open source UFO game, some are my ideas how to enhance the already very good player experience even further and I believe it would be great to have something similar in X2 as well.. Not sure if feasible in the way how the game is designed though.. Radar tower the radars in the bases cannot effectively cover the whole landmass of the Earth. Adding a few radar towers on the Geoscape in the blindspots could cover all continents.There would have to be construction time and costs as well as upkeep involved, and the coverage would be less (say half) of the basic radar and would also not upgrade to quantum. The bombers could also target it during their runs on the geoscape. UFO Dissasembly Yard For every downed UFO, you would have an option to either collect the bounty (there could be bids from the world regions - selling a UFO to them could reduce the panic in that region f.e.), or to keep it for dissasembly. For this, you would build an installation, where the downed UFOs would be transferred to (transfer time between 48 and 96 hours). Capacity of the yard would be limited, eventually you could build more. Every newly (not shot down before) downed UFO would trigger a research, in which the the tech and the stats of the UFO would be discovered. Every UFO could be dissasembled using workshops (as projects) into individual items (alloys, alenium, surgical tables, propulsion, navigation, electronics, weapons etc), which would be used for triggering research. Later, the items could be either sold or used for crafting items, planes etc. Damaged UFOs would generate less items to research/sell as opposed of undamaged ones (Landed and conquered ones). This would add another layer of gameplay, as now the items are gathered automatically after end of tactical battles. Cleaner base After defeating the base, it would be occupied by Xenonaut forces and would trigger research of the advanced structures. The player would have to transfer/hire scientists and engineers to that base to start the research. Until the research would be completed, the remnants of cleaner forces would attack the base trying to re-take it. After completing the research, the base attacks would stop and the base would be used as an additional source of research/crafting and/or income generation. The base itself would either become another regular base, or it would have to remain as is (no additional structures could be built) SAM site missile site (f.e. a modified ICBM site, provided by a region or country or built by player), used to shoot modified long range AA missiles at airborne UFOs (preferably the big ones - cruiser, harvester, battleship, carrier, bomber), helping to soften them up before they get attacked by the Xenonaut interceptors or to defend bases (or off-site installations) as an extra layer of defense. Alien moon base The aliens could have a logistical hub on the moon, used to coordinate attacks on Earth and stack up forces, represented by a base. Such base could be assaulted by the xenonaut forces (or by the SAM site with a special missile to allow the base attack) to weaken the logistics of the aliens. The ultimate Dropship and at least Exosuit equipped soldiers would have to be used for such a mission. This mission could be triggered in corelation to the orbital bombardment, which is not implemeted yet.

Let it be an option in the menu to switch it on and off. That would please everyone

Night missions have the potential to be exciting, scary, and add more variety to the game. Many people's -- including my own -- predominant memories of the original XCOM games is from night missions, such as creeping through corn fields at night... Those games didn't incentivise you to do night missions, but they were often highlights of the game. What I'm trying to do is engineer a way to give those experiences to players. At the moment it just doesn't happen as players avoid night missions, and night missions don't really feel much different. Could you not say that the abduction missions are more difficult than normal missions, so why do them? I'm trying to remember if there's any additional reward. Reduced panic? Extra alenium and alloys? You can apply that to the "night" missions I've described. Upon mission completion you capture the fog generators, which converts into alenium and alloys for you. Is that incentive enough? If you still want the choice of tackling a mission by day or night, then I like @Mr.Xia's suggestions, including nighttime affecting Sebellian's regeneration, Wraith's cloaking fields, etc -- so long as nighttime doesn't just remove the things that make the aliens interesting! I can get behind certain equipment giving buffs to make you want to do night missions, but then would that flip things, and you'd never want to do day missions? I just think that my idea is a bit more interesting and provides plenty of creative possibilities. We might be coming at this from different directions because I'm not fundamentally against "forcing" a mission or mission type on a player, if it helps advance the plot or creates cool and fun situations. Is the Cleaner HQ a "forced" mission? I think so. Base defence missions are "forced"? Alien bases? I guess you can skip those, but you're heavily penalised for doing so. My suggestions for Terror / Abduction / Alien Base missions are really to ensure players have those memorable, scary experiences; as well as solving other things I think are issues, such as increasing the variety on offer, making the game more atmospheric, making more of the bravery system, making Mantids more interesting, adding more situations that require different approaches...

@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.

Me neither, but I have no compunction saying that they need a discount - if the intent is for them to be a viable option before, just throwing a number out there, day 120 (around the time I started adding medbays, training and more radars to my secondary bases). Guilty! I usually post on forums when I'm buggered by insomnia at 2AM local time and too frustrated to play games. I just ragequit on the expansion to Green Hell and am booting up Terra Invicta again for a PURGE playthrough. In my day-to-day I have to be very careful with words, so when I turn that part of my brain off... yeah, it's a lame excuse but that's the one I got. So I recognize that the language I use is condescending and inflammatory. For that I apologize sincerely. I love you all. You are my homies. And very soon together we will purge the xenos <3

"Honey I think our neighbor has been replaced by an alien". "Don't be silly darling, you said the same thing about my sister's ex-husband". "This time it is different! You gotta believe me!"

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

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! 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) Aircraft will now start to immediately repair Armour after being upgraded. 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. Crash Fixes: 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 crash that could sometimes occur during the alien turn if the aliens were using hovering units like Servitors. Fixed a rare crash that could occur in the Soldier Equip pool. Fixed a rare crash that could occur if you built over 50 planes.

I found out visual and sound effect is a bit awkward. why does the blood spill when it seems that the shield does its job? It is supposed to spark by ricochet or to make a sound of thick and heavy sound on impact at least. Also, why isn't the shield improved alongside technological advancement unlike other infantry armor, equipment, and weaponry, etc. ?? there should be one made out of alien alloy I think.

@Chris I have managed to capture the sound issue with the Ares sound not stopping after it moves. I have attached the save at the start of the turn, a save after it has moved (though I took a shot at a wall in front of it before remembering to save the game), and the log file. Hopefully this will let you identify the issue. user_sound_issue-18.json auto_groundcombat_turn_6_start-354.json output.log

Hello I'm also playing using Steam Deck and the gaming experience has been great using custom mapping layout. I think it should be visible in community mappings, but the changes I made to the default keyboard and mouse layout were these: Mouse scroll up/down using L1/R1 Left touchpad for numbers 1-9 L4/R4: Q and E L5/R5: Ctrl and Space Y: Inventory (i) A: Crouch (c) X: Enter B: R On thing missing for now is that I'd like to have F1-F4 keys somewhere, but otherwise works splendidly.

Hello everyone and welcome to 2023! December was a good month for the project even though it was curtailed by the Christmas holidays, as we released V25 and then opened the game up to the first wave of open beta testers. We didn't add many new features as most of our time was spent gathering community feedback and fixing bugs identified by our new (and old) testers, so I'll instead talk more broadly about we're going to be working on in the next couple of months. Open Beta: The first thing to say is that the open beta has already been extremely helpful. We started by inviting a small group of new testers (50) and asked them to post up their initial impressions of the game, and report any bugs / issues they encountered so we could fix them. The response has been really good so far. Thankfully, the initial response to the game has been almost universally positive (i.e. nobody saying that they didn't enjoy the game, or that it felt too similar to Xenonauts 1 to be worth playing) but we've also recieved a lot of useful feedback about what people do and don't like about the game. Stability is generally pretty good but there's still been a LOT of bugs reported that we're currently working through - every bug fixed makes the game feel better to play! As we release future builds we'll be inviting new players to join the Open Beta so we can maintain a continual stream of "first impressions" posts, but we'll probably only be inviting 50-100 people for each new build. However, if you're not lucky enough to get an invite, you'll still be able to give the game a test via our public demo! Public Demo: Xenonauts 2 is going to be participating in the upcoming Steam Next Fest that runs from 6-13th February 2023, and we're going to be putting out a demo that will allow you to play the first couple of months of a campaign (usually about five or six tactical missions). This should allow people to get a taste of the full game, and hopefully get everyone excited for our upcoming Early Access release! Upcoming Work: As such, the dev team will mostly be spending their time on improving this demo this month. Our primary goal is to get the tutorial implemented, as if experienced players feel it would be helpful then I imagine new players will be entirely lost without it! This is a quick 5-minute sequence that covers the plot events immediately prior to the start of the game, and introduces the player to the key controls for the Geoscape and tactical combat. We're also going to be improving the difficulty settings so that people can better adjust the challenge to their level of expertise, balancing the game, and working on fixing as many of the reported bugs / usability issues as possible. The project is entering an exciting period now and I wanted to say thanks to everyone continuing to read and contribute. Hope everyone had a good holiday!

Hi everyone - time for the monthly progress update. The big news this month has been the release of V24, which is now coming to the end of its testing period and should be released onto the default Steam branches in the next week or two (rather than being on the Experimental branches). General Progress: V24 seems to have been received well by our community. It's the first time the community has seen large chunks of our new UI and some of our improved combat environments, and the game has generally been tightened up in a lot of ways. It's now feeling increasingly solid - although there's still a lot of balancing and polishing left to do to make it a genuinely good strategy game that really rewards the time you put into it! However, as the first public release we've put out in about five months, V24 had some stability issues and we've spent much of the month fixing them up. Although this is obviously very important work, it means we've not really been working on big new features on the coding side of things. However here's some of the things we managed to get in anyway: The Research screen has now been skinned in the final UI style. The Engineering screen is next and I've spent quite a bit of time this month with our UI artist trying to finalise the design for that screen. We're pretty close to that being done. Most of the tiles for the Arid biome for the tactical combat are now largely done, so the only remaining work on the environment art is the remainder of the Soviet Town biome and then a final visual pass on the dropships and UFOs. I'm working on the level design for the Arid biome at the moment so hopefully it'll be in V25. I've written another ~8 research projects or so. We've added a system so that the sell value of items can gradually decline as you sell more and more of them. I'm going to be using this as soft pressure to discourage players from grinding too many crash sites (doing so makes the game very repetitive), as the returns will eventually fall below the Airstrike / Bounty value of the crashsite. We're working on smoothing the loading process so the game doesn't keep throwing the annoying "This game isn't responding" messages in Windows if you are playing in a window. We're planning to start work on V25 relatively soon after V24 is released onto the standard Steam branches. The main feature I'm hoping to include will be the racial abilities for the various types of alien in the tactical combat, but beyond that we'll just be focusing on content and general balancing / polish. Playtest / Open Beta: As we want to expand the number of people playing the game and giving feedback / reporting bugs in preparation for our Early Access launch next year, we're going to be launching our Playtest branches when we release V25. These Playtest branches will be using the Steam Playtest function, which allows us to give users access to a free temporary version of Xenonauts 2 that will be deleted once the game enters Early Access. This isn't going to be a proper open beta, as we'll only be inviting a few hundred people to join the Playtest with each update. We want a mix of fresh players and experienced players giving feedback on each update (as they tend to look for different things), and we know a lot of players will only want to play once and give some quick impressions / feedback and then come back and play properly when the game is done. Unfortunately this means it's unlikely everyone who applies will get into the Playtest, as we've had quite a lot of signups already. However the picking is done randomly by Steam so if you're signed up you've got as much chance as anyone else - and if you're not signed up already, I've reenabled the signup button for the next two weeks. Just click the green button on the Xenonauts 2 Steam store page! (I will however be making special exceptions for forum regulars. If you're someone who posts here semi-often and you'd like access to the Playtest, just post in this thread and I'll send you a Steam key when we do the first batch.) That's everything from me until next month - thanks for reading! Just to be clear - if you want to get into the playtest, please just post something here saying that you're interested. Please don't post any of your personal details up, as I'll be DMing you a Steam key here on the forums when the time comes!