Chris

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This build fixes some more bugs found by the community over the weekend, and found by our own testing. We'll probably do some further testing tomorrow to ensure these fixes haven't created any new bugs, and if we're happy with the stability we'll then launch it onto the public branches. Gameplay Changes: Slightly adjusted the crews loadouts of the Abduction sites at about day 190 and 250. These both previously used a mix of plasma and fusion weapons. The first site now uses entirely plasma (as it's too early for fusion weapons), and the second site now uses entirely fusion (as it's too late for plasma). Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur after losing a base defence mission. Fixed an issue where Servitors would be invisible until damaged. Fixed an issue where the Cyberdrone frontal shield 3d model would be missing, even if the shield was still intact. Fixed a bug where the UFO hull would not be hidden if the UFO door was opened during the alien turn, but would then immediately disappear as soon as you moved a soldier during your own turn. Fixed an issue where the game would sometimes show a 100% hit chance with a grenade but then that grenade path would always fail. Fixed healed HP being removed when transitioning from ENDGAME part 1 to part 2. Fixed a minor issue with part of the the Singularity Core model clipping through the floor. Improved the visuals for the damaged states of the various alien base wall screens.

@Nodrak OK, some thoughts on your mission playthrough: You should absolutely take the first shot against the Heavy Servitor in the screenshot. You're slightly beyond weapon range so it'll do reduced damage but there's no downside, particularly as those enemies can't reaction fire. And there's only a 3% chance of missing. I don't really see that there's any bug in the situation where you have an Andron looking into your dropship. You can't suppress robots, but Androns have low Reflexes so you won't get reaction fired unless a soldier drops to relatively low TU, and you really don't want it reaction firing into your dropship because it'll suppress everyone. If you don't know how Initiative works for reaction fire then it's worth reading the tooltips on that, as it'll make a big difference here. Anyway, you've got a few options to deal with the situation: Advance with the shield guy, then shoot the Andron with the shield guy until his TU drop low enough to bait out the reaction fire (which should be angled away from the rest of your team). You can do the same with a MARS or a Colossus, which might be able to tank the damage, or just your most expendable soldier. Alternatively toss a Demo grenade at it to shred its cover and armour and then just wreck it with rifles / sniper rifles. If you're not going to kill it, you can toss a smoke at it so it'll have very low accuracy reaction fire. If cover is crushable, you have to path through it to crush it - the game doesn't let you simply walk onto the tile containing the cover. But I can't remember if the full height wood stacks are crushable. I think the LMG 0% shot might be the crux of the issue. How did you force the shot if the game was preventing you from doing it? I assume you chose to aim at the ground a few ties in front of the target, right? Because that's the big accuracy hack in the game (same as in Xeno 1). If you aim directly at an alien, then any miss shots are disallowed from hitting that alien. But if you aim at the ground just in front or behind it, then the miss shots suddenly can hit that alien because you're no longer aiming at it - and we've got no way of knowing whether the player is actually aiming for the floor or instead trying to cheese hits on the alien. We could fix it by making miss shots have more deviation, but we get endless complaints if miss shots fly well wide of the target as it looks silly (even novices can shoot in the general direction of a target). The solution which we've had in place since Xeno 1 was to set units to have a 25% stopping chance unless they were being specifically targeted, which means a miss shot passing through their tile should only hit them 1/4 of the time. If you did actually get 4 hits from a 10-round burst in this setup then you got very lucky even if every single miss shot passed through the alien's tile. Unless the system is malfunctioning, which it perhaps could be. Damage is only applied at the end of a burst. We do get complaints that you can blast 10 rounds at a thin wall and you've got no chance of injuring a unit stood immediately behind it, and we'll fix that in M7 if we get time. Shooting beyond range reduces the damage done. You can shoot a unit 40 tiles away if you want, but you're not going to hurt it much. I think if you're testing this stuff you might want to enable the damage numbers in the campaign options. That said, I hadn't quite realised how much stacking accuracy could allow you to shoot beyond max range and I might need to tweak the formulas to make it fall off faster. Shields are overpowered at present; they're too reliable at blocking damage. They'll be getting slightly nerfed on the higher difficulty settings in M7. The Colossus is still underpowered in M6. We did make some improvements compared to earlier iterations, but not enough to stop it being underwhelming.

As Kouki has mentioned already, we appreciate the depth you've gone into here. Note that I wrote this post before your post with all the pictures from your Harvester mission, so I'll post another one below in reply to that. It's possible that will explain some of my questions but I've already written this mini-essay so I can't be bothered to revise it! Basically, I guess I'd like you to clarify some of these issues a bit more. It seems to me like you've identified some balance issues with specific weapons, and some examples where the systems aren't working quite as intended, and then you've drawn some conclusions from them. I don't think I'm entirely understanding some of your conclusions, but let's work through the first two categories first. Weapon Balance Issues: You've spotted a bug with the Cleaner Accelerated Rifles, which I'll patch in the next hotfix for M6. These are meant to have identical stats to the human versions, but the range bonuses have got out of sync. This feeds into a broader issue where the alien weapons have differing range bonuses to the human equivalents, which they shouldn't really. I'll fix it so that alien rifles have the same range bonuses as human rifles, but I'll do that in Milestone 7 because this will potentially significantly affect the game balance and it's too late in the day to do this in M7. Yes, I could believe that pistols are a bit too strong at the moment. I'm not sure what the table you've made showing pistol vs shotgun means though - I understand the axes, but what are the actual values in the table? Expected total damage? Cumulative accuracy? Regarding sniper rifles: I noticed a bug where the low-TU fire mode had a 40 No Move bonus, which was meant to be 20. I'll fix that. Yes, it's true that a soldier with ~63 accuracy can get a guaranteed hit on an alien stood out in the open if they use the best fire mode, but I don't think that's a massive problem. You could make the argument that the shot accuracy could be a bit lower, but they can only fire once per turn and there's usually intervening cover in the way, and if you move more than about 5 tiles you won't have enough TU to fire it. Having high accuracy is still valuable because it does negate cover, or permits a soldier to reliably use the lower accuracy fire mode to give them more TU to play with. Why would you expect an alien plasma rifle to be more accurate than a human sniper rifle? That's apples and oranges. Overall, I'm not sure I see the major issues you seem to be implying in your post - basically the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle gets about 10% higher hit chance at most ranges than it should? And the pistols are a bit stronger than they should be? Although those are issues, for me that doesn't add up to a player having a dramatically different experience to what you'd expect. So maybe I'm missing something. Mechanical Issues: In general, I'm 99.9% certain that the RNG and shooting numbers are working as intended. By which I mean that I don't think there's a bug causing reaction fire shots to be more accurate than normal shots, or that short-range burst fire has a hidden hit penalty. In fact, I think on the experimental game branch it might print the shot debug info in the logs so you can check the hit chance vs the hit rolls if you want to see yourself. I think short-range burst fire has been made weaker compared to X1, though. The short range bonus in X1 was much stronger but only kicked in over 5 tiles, whereas in X2 it kicks in over a longer distance but totals to less at point-blank range. But the hit chance values on the cursor are most likely correct. Is your suggestion that Armour Accuracy penalties be multipliers (e.g. -10%) rather than a flat -5? So then they'd affect high accuracy soldiers more? Again, I'm not entirely clear what your tables are saying when it comes to the relationship between small / large enemy sizes and the short range bonus. Could you further explain your argument that this unduly benefits rifles / sniper rifles? Why would crouching affect the range bonus? The short range bonus reflects the fact that the target is larger when it is closer to you, and the long range penalty that a projectile becomes less effective beyond its maximum range. The crouch bonus modifies your accuracy because it makes it easier to shoot more accurately at the target, which is a different thing. Plus in game terms the shotgun gets most of its accuracy from being close to the target and I don't it to get a huge extra bonus simply because the soldier also crouched (and the reasons why the long range penalties aren't affected should be self-evident). Conclusions: I don't understand what you mean by the % hit chance being more like a "shot difficulty" value, and to be honest this makes me think you might have misunderstood something important along the way. Basically the game rolls a random 100 against the hit chance you see on the cursor, and if you roll less than or equal to that number then the shot hits. Even if that means the bullet has to clip through something solid or that the soldier has to contort in a ridiculous way to find a shot path capable of hitting the target collider. If the roll is higher than the hit chance, then the game runs a "miss" shot calculation and figures out the potential deviation and what intervening cover can be hit. That calculation isn't perfect (there's a few things I'd tweak if we have time) but the shot is prevented from hitting the target even if the soldier has to contort ridiculously to find a way to not shoot their target. That said, it'd still be interesting to hear what you think is going on, because the symptoms might be worth discussion even if you've misdiagnosed the disease. You've not explained your argument that miss shots are more dangerous than they should be, but you also mention that miss shots are too accurate further down. Could you elaborate?

We'll be looking at the HEVY arcs properly in M7, as we're aware it's still not working like it should. The suggestion for a subtle trail on grenades is a good idea. I'll note it down and we'll probably implement it if it's simple, but there's no guarantee we'll have time to get to it before release.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! As we were planning to leave 6.22.0 on the Experimental branch over the weekend anyway, we thought we'd release another batch of hotfixes before then. We're still planning to release onto the public branches on Monday if no further serious bugs are found over the weekend. Gameplay Changes: One of our bugfixes has addressed an issue where autoresolved air combat was sometimes far less effective than it should be (mostly when using interceptors equipped with torpedoes). The various types of Cleaner interrogation projects now all mark the appropriate captured cleaner item as Junk. Bugfixes: Fixed a bug that was reducing the effectiveness of torpedoes in some autoresolved air combats. Fixed being able to stack together the Retreat speed bonus and the Afterburner speed bonus. Fixed some shroud-related issues with the Singularity Core object in the Battleship. Fixed some of the engineering projects having placeholder tooltips.

The interrogation being autocomplete is intentional, but I'll fix the issue with the item not being flagged as junk.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! We were hoping 6.21.0 would be ready for public release, but player testing suggested it needed another round of fixes first. We'll leave this build on the Experimental branch over the weekend and then release onto the public branches on Monday if no further serious bugs are found. Balance Changes: Fusion weapons now cause 5 Armour Destruction per shot (up from 3). Vehicle cannons now have double the damage / armour pen / armour destruction of the equivalent rifles, which works out a nerf for early-game cannons and a buff for late-game cannons: All cannons now have 24 range. Previously they had 20 range, but were bugged and would actually increase their hit chance beyond this point. Ballistic Cannon - damage now 68 (down from 70), armour destruction now 4 (down from 10) Laser Cannon - damage now 80 (down from 95), armour destruction now 16 (up from 10) Gauss Cannon - armour penetration now 20 (up from 0), armour destruction now 8 (down from 10) Fusion cannon - damage now 144 (down from 150), armour penetration now 30 (up from 0) Added 1-4 extra enemies to the Cleaner Base mission, depending on difficulty setting. Updated the UOO Bridge Assault mission so that it has slightly fewer aliens in the main room, and a few more weaker enemies spread out through the edges of the map. Gameplay Changes: We've improved the way grenades work in several ways: We've fixed the bug where any missed grenade throw inside a building or in an alien / Xenonaut base map would always hit the ceiling directly above the thrower and explode. Grenade arcs can now be a bit flatter, which means grenades are less likely to strike the ceiling in general. If a grenade throw path has a 0% hit chance because of a blocking object, the throw path now renders red beyond that object / ceiling tile. This should make it easier to see what is actually blocking the throw, We've also fixed an issue where the game would display a positive hit chance for a particular tile, but then incorrectly refuse to let you throw at that tile (as if you had a 0% chance). Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where base defence missions would allow you to use soldiers to defend the base who were already in an airborne dropship, which would then cause the game to be in a broken state on the Geoscape. Fixed a bug where you could sometimes take sentry guns on normal missions when using advanced dropships. Fixed the UFO outer doors sometimes not rendering correctly if the UFO is sighted in the shroud before the soldier has direct line of sight on the door itself. Fixed Cyberdrones that are killed on impact in crash sites not appearing visually dead. Fixed the Doomsday Counter tooltip on the strategy layer not including the +Doomsday values generated by the difficulty setting (which is usually +1 or +2 per day). Fixed a bug on the UOO Sabotage mission where the aliens could use some of the "teleporter" tiles in the Xenonaut spawn zone as actual teleporters, and attack your soldiers from behind. Fixed the MARS having the incorrect movement sound when using its light armour variant. Fixed some wooden plank tall props not having a 100% blocking chance. Fixed a building on a Boreal map that didn't have an internal floor.

If this is an issue in milestone 5 then I don't think we can fix it; we're focusing on Milestone 6 now (which should release in a few days) and switching back to 5 to debug a save from that version takes too long. However from memory I think there may be a bug in Milestone 5 about Endgame launching and having soldiers / dropships at a secondary base confusing the game. Can you try loading an earlier save from before the Endgame launch, but then move all your soldiers and dropships to your original base (and sell the ones you don't need) before you try to launch Endgame?

That's a separate issue though - vision cones are slightly more than 90 degrees, which you can see in other parts of the game too.

There's nothing we can do about this unfortunately. Windows are always the full width of the tile in game terms; it'd look natural enough if the windows were as wide as the other type of sawmill window you see on the sides of the building but that'd make the game look visually boring. EDIT - well, maybe there is something we can do. But at present this isn't really a bug, and fixing it would involve making further changes to the LOS system. I'll check with the coders if my suggested solution is potentially possible.

Thanks. We'll look into this - we appreciate the detailed bug report!

Thanks, but unfortunately it looks like this save is from the start of the UOO Bridge Assault mission, so it's a bit too early in the campaign to use.

As long as you're not actively feeding assets from the game into an AI (which is potentially giving the AI ownership over them), then you're free to create or share your creations however you like.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! As this build fixes the last remaining critical issues in Milestone 6, we'll release this build onto the public branches as the first Milestone 6 Stable build next week if our players do not encounter any serious issues over the weekend. Bugfixes: Fixed the Abductor hull not hiding correctly when the main door is opened. Fixed an issue where certain tiles around the outer edge of the UFO interior would be visible in the shroud. Various visual fixes to a selection of tactical maps.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This update fixes most of the remaining issues blocking the Milestone 6 public release, but there are still some problems with the Abductor UFO hull revealing that need to be corrected (hopefully we can debug that tomorrow). Balancing: ENDGAME part 1 reinforcement timer increased by 1 turn, and four extra alien Praetorian-ranked aliens added to the mission. There's also now dedicated spawn points for the enemy noncombatants, so they always spawn inside buildings. Bugfixes: Fixed Sentry Guns being automatically assigned to ENDGAME / UOO mission strike teams, and crashing the game if you actually tried to bring them on the mission. Fixed various display issues for the multi-level UFOs in the tactical combat (except the Abductor, which we're still looking into). Fixed the game completion achievement not always correctly unlocking after you win the campaign. Fixed the engineering screen UI resizing itself when you add the MARS / ARES rebuild projects to the queue. Fixed the default soldier arrangement for the Pegasus dropship spawning a couple of soldiers inside diagonal wall tiles. Fixed the roof tiles on the ENDGAME part 1 mission not being properly destructible. Fixed some of the walls in the UOO Sabotage mission not visually updating their appearance when destroyed, and still looking undamaged. Fixed the vehicle Heavy Reinforced Armour incorrectly being called the Heavy Ceramite Armour. Fixed the ENDGAME part 1 intro incorrectly referring to the Pegasus.