Chris

Thanks. So most of the walls in the game are two-sided, and what's happening here is that the two sides aren't being destroyed together when one of them gets destroyed (which is what should happen). Might be because they're diagonal walls maybe, but we'll have a look into it and see what is going on.

Right now there's not really been any testing of the alien invasion curve; I've played quite a few Probe missions for testing purposes over the last few months but I've not really tested the later missions. Unusual missions like Alien Base / Xenonaut Base Defence or even Raid / Terror missions might be wildly too hard or easy for the point in which they appear. This is something I do plan to start addressing in upcoming builds but by all means do flag up missions that are far too hard. Sounds like Androns might be one of them :P I actually thought I'd made Androns a support units for Wraiths whenver they appear, so if you're encountering missions that are just Androns then I've made a mistake somewhere. They're meant to be tough and scary but there should only be a few of them.

To be honest, I suspect both I and a lot of people in the community would be disappointed if we don't deliver a game that improves on the gameplay of X1 as well as the graphics. We'll also be doing our best to include features that mean a lot to small groups of people - e.g. good mod tools for the modding community, large font mode for people with bad eyesight / small monitors, etc - but we're also going to be improving the core gameplay experience too. The majority of players just play the vanilla experience so we can't rely on tuning the more specialist things.

Thanks. Yeah, I can reproduce this - we'll have a look at what might be causing it and try and fix it up as soon as possible.

Interesting. So you called the dropship back to base and re-issued them with armour and it fixed the crash? We'll look into what was causing it anyway.

Also, given I perhaps went off a bit on a tangent there, it's worth mentioning a few specific points about the base mechanics and the air combat. Not sure if you read the associated threads but the base already supports individual scientist / engineer staff assignments to specific buildings, has a power system and we're going to be looking at adjacency bonuses for buildings in the future. In the air combat the interceptors have additional customisable components beyond just weapons and we're looking into adding cover to the battlefield in the form of clouds, adding several new weapons and AI behaviours, experimenting with hit and evade chances, having a "proper" autoresolve formula, etc. Whether you class that sort of stuff as sufficient improvement over X1 is up to you really; it's definitely evolutionary rather than revolutionary change and your mileage may vary. But as I've outlined in several recent posts on the topic it's necessary to first copy the X1 mechanics before you are able to start testing changes to them.

I think it's a valid question to raise, and I'll probably write a longer post on the topic at some point because I imagine you're not the only person thinking this. I guess the question really boils down to what an individual considers sufficient innovation / gameplay change to be "different" to what came before. Over time the design Xenonauts 2 has drifted from being full of bold new ideas to something far more akin to the first game, which mostly happened as a result of those bold ideas colliding with reality and coming up short. The community has definitely played a role in our decision to move X2 closer to X1, but that could be interpreted either as hardcore fans hating change or just people flagging up new ideas that are outright worse than what they were replacing. Both of the changes you mention are in service of a deeper strategic layer than was originally planned in X2. I guess over time I've realised that that complexity in the tactical and strategic layers relative to other games in the genre pretty much IS Xenonauts; a lot of people liked Xenonauts 1 because the strategic layer was more freeform than the modern XCOM games and simplifying the strategy layer as we originally planned in X2 may not actually have been the adventurous choice given that is also what our main rivals have done. I've also found that the various mechanics in X-Com games are so heavily interconnected its difficult to change a major element without negatively affecting other parts of the game; having a simpler air combat model limits the Geoscape more than you might initially think. In general, I think within video games and the strategy genre in particular there's a proud tradition of sequels refining the original game without having to fundamentally change the mechanics. Civilisation II and Master of Orion II spring to mind, but something like Doom II also works for the comparison. If we deliver Xenonauts 1 with updated graphics, better stability and usability, address a number of the gameplay problems, add some new aliens / technology / other content and maybe a couple of well-chosen new gameplay systems to give players more options - is that not enough? Ultimately that's a question of personal taste, really. That said, I do feel bad for people who backed our Kickstarter or bought a pre-order on the basis of our bold promises about new features that have since changed; I think anyone in that situation has a legitimate case to argue they had been missold (which is why I'm happy to offer refunds to such people).

Thanks. Yeah, I can reproduce that from your save - we'll take a look and see if we can get it fixed up.

Thanks. Yeah, I'm getting this too - that save is useful. Probably just an issue in how the destruction settings have been set up; we'll look into it on Monday.

Thanks. If I play this in V8.1 though the turn doesn't freeze up, it does eventually return control to you - but it just takes a really long time to process all the alien attacks. Are you playing with the sound on? If so you can hear the sounds of the aliens shooting all the civilians during their turn, so you can tell the game hasn't frozen. Or is it definitely freezing up for you?

Great, thanks for the extra info. So I did a bit of testing myself and it looks like you can just right-click to unassign armour like you can any other piece of equipment, which causes the effect in your original screenshot (it shouldn't allow you to remove the basic armour). Looks like you've also found a second bug too with the soldier assignment clearing the loadout. We'll have a look into what's causing that.

Thanks. So what's happening here is you're getting two interception pop-ups, one from your interceptors attacking the Fighter and the other from the Fighter attacking you (if you cancel the first pop-up the second one still pops up where the fighter is forcing you into combat). The game's crashing at the point because it can't calculate a combat that's already been resolved. The deouble pop-up shouldn't be allowed to happen so it's good to have a save. Fighting the manual battle against the fighter results in you losing an interceptor, which I think causes a seperate crash. You've never lost an aircraft in combat before and not experienced a crash, have you?

Thanks. I think this crash is caused by you losing a fighter in combat - did you ever had an air combat where you lost a fighter before this?

Thanks. The new air combat model is arriving in the next build so we're probably not going to spend any time trying to fix this - but I suspect what's happening is that the weapon is being used at a range where it does no damage (but the game will still allow you to fire it for some reason). But yeah the missiles should work fine in the new AC system!

Yeah, I suspect that's just good fortune on your part!