Chris

Understandable. However I think if you'd played the final game with those exciting new mechanics, you'd probably have eventually concluded that X2 was less of a game than X1 once you'd got over the initial novelty and possibly been left a bit disappointed. Making X2 "more of the same but better" should ensure that everyone who enjoyed X1 also enjoys their time with the sequel - although I get it's conceptually less interesting. Most of those threads are out of date now; as I've mentioned above most of the changes are quite subtle and we're only now at the stage of development where we can be testing the new ideas. I'm already compiling a list of the changes relative to X1 and I'll probably want to publish it for the Early Access launch, but right now we're still experimenting with those changes and figuring out which ones work and which ones don't.

The numbers can be changed; I'm using 1 level = 30% difference as an example but we'll see what we end up once I actually start assigning values. Using a value of 10% for each level might be problematic though, because even starting level 1 armour would need a weapon with penetration level 10 to fully ignore it. You're going to need quite big numbers if you go down that route. Weapon level and armour level are somewhat clumsy names, admittedly. But I'm not sure what would be a better alternative - "Penetration" and "Hardness" are more descriptive, but they don't immediately link together like Weapon Level and Armour Level do (after all, the only purpose of these values is to be compared to one another). It's relative - what matters in the calculation is the difference between the two values.

One of the perennial problems in Xenonauts has been how best to handle damage, armour, and armour penetration. We want a system that is realistic, flexible, generates interesting choices, and is easy to display in the UI and for the player to understand. After quite a lot thinking I've settled on what I feel is the ideal solution. The system listed below is deeper than the one in Xenonauts, but should also be easy to understand and display in the UI. I thought I'd post this up on the forums to get some feedback before we start implementation; I'm pretty sure the idea is solid but it's always good to see if anyone can poke holes in my design or find a new perspective on things. Damage Randomisation vs. Locational Damage: This first change is relatively simple - instead of weapons inflicting a random damage amount somewhere between 50% - 150% of the base weapon damage, hits are now randomly assigned to a specific body part and the damage is modified based on which part is hit. Head: 20% hit chance, 2x damage modifier Body: 40% hit chance, 1x damage modifier Left Arm: 10% hit chance, 0.5x damage modifier Right Arm: 10% hit chance, 0.5x damage modifier Left Leg: 10% hit chance, 0.5x damage modifier Right Leg: 10% hit chance, 0.5x damage modifier The main advantage here is that it's easy to add in locational injuries based on which body part is hit, and in future expansions or DLC we could actually split out armour so it covers specific body parts if we wanted (e.g. maybe a specific helmet reduces the damage modifier if you are shot in the head). Potentially we could give certain weapons like sniper rifles a bonus chance to hit the head (effectively a critical hit) if we wanted, too. Armour HP: In X2 armour currently provides resistances that provide a % reduction to incoming damage, which I don't think works particularly well - as even the best armour doesn't offer 100% resistance, being hit by any weapon will cause damage to the soldier below. This doesn't really make sense; shooting a basic pistol at a soldier wearing a late-game Exosuit shouldn't hurt them. In the new system Armour conceptually works like it does in XCOM - it provides the unit a seperate pool of Armour HP that absorbs damage before the unit takes damage to their own HP. This Armour HP is permanently consumed when it stops damage, so 20 Armour HP is only ever going to prevent 20 incoming damage (i.e. it's only applied once, rather than being applied to every shot that hits the unit). However, unlike XCOM, the "hardness" of the Armour is also a factor. This is reflected in a new characteristic called the "Armour Level" which is explained further below. In general more advanced armour will have a higher Armour Level, whereas heavy armour (i.e. the armour module that increases protection at the cost of extra weight) will boost Armour HP instead. Resistances: Resistances have not been removed from X2 entirely, but they are now used to represent inherent resistances that do not change as a result of penetration and so forth. For example, units with rebreathers or enclosed helmets are immune to gas damage and this is achieved by setting 100% gas resistance. Similarly, certain alien races may have an inherent resistance to particular types of damage (encouraging players to use weapons that might otherwise be sub-optimal). Androns might have a 30% resistance to Kinetic damage, and Wraiths might have a 30% Energy damage resistance. This would also be handled via resistances. (This system can already be used by modders; it's not difficult to add +20% Energy Resistance to a piece or armour or an armour module. The problem is that there's no UI space to display this sort of stuff, but in a mod it's probably fine just to display this stuff on tooltips and research pop-ups.) Weapon Level & Armour Level: The final system is the most important. Both weapons and armour now have a Level, which represents penetrative power for weapons and hardness for armour. They share the name "Level" because they are compared to one another to decide whether some or all of the damage penetrates the armour or is absorbed by it. The lookup table is as follows: Armour +3: -90% damage / suppression Armour +2: -60% damage / suppression Armour +1: -30% damage / suppression Equal: damage treated normally Weapon +1: 30% damage penetrates Weapon +2: 60% damage penetrates Weapon +3: 90% damage penetrates If the Armour level is higher the incoming damage is reduced by a percentage, and sufficiently hard armour is almost impervious to weapons with low penetration. Conversely, if the Weapon level is higher then a percentage of the damage becomes penetrative damage and will bypass the armour while also damaging it (penetrative damage damages both the armour AND the unit underneath). Note that the Weapon Level represents penetrative power and is *not* the same as the weapon tier / family - i.e. a Laser Pistol is likely to have a lower Weapon Level than a Ballistic Sniper despite being a more advanced tier of weapon (but it would likely have a higher Weapon Level than a Ballistic Pistol)! The advantage of this system is that we can model technology progress in a more interesting way. I think the Gun Drone from X1 is a good example; let's say it has Burst Cannon that fires 10 shots that do 12 damage each. If you give this weapon good accuracy but a relatively low Weapon Level, it'll be utterly deadly against unarmoured starting troops. A starting soldier wearing heavy armour might survive a burst but is most likely going to be both injured and suppressed. What's cool is that once you have advanced armour the Gun Drone immediately becomes less threatening. The incoming damage and suppression is reduced even against your lightly-armoured troops, and your heavily-armoured troops might have enough HP / Armour to eat the entire burst at short range and still survive. Soldiers with late-game heavy armour can pretty much ignore the Gun Drone entirely, which I think would make an Exosuit like the X1 Predator feel much more like the walking tank it is intended to be. So, those are the new systems we're planning to implement. What do you guys think?

Yeah, the addition of the space station unfortunately came after I'd spent about two weeks writing the plot research, so I'm going to have to rewrite it. But I feel like the game will be stronger for having a focal point. Mild spoilers ahead: the station is (unsurprisingly) the target of the ENDGAME mission, but while it is capable of perodically destroying cities from orbit its main purpose is to serve as a navigation beacon for the incoming fleet. I guess it doesn't entirely make sense that the aliens launch an invasion at all - but initially the aliens were expecting to steamroll Earth, and once the humans have recovered a few UFOs and the aliens realise that the natives aren't going to be pushovers it's too late to stop the humans developing advanced technology (and so the full-scale invasion must continue). This means things escalate faster than the original Xenonauts in the sense that the aliens are clearly visible and clearly hostile from day 1, but that's fine. I'll need to update some of the writing but the game can still be internally consistent with those tweaks.

The crash logs are saying you were trying to shoot something with an Accelerated SMG, and the ammo was invalid - so presumably you've somehow ended up with the wrong clip in the gun. If the weapon was working fine beforehand then this might be the result of a bug we've fixed in the latest hotfix where the old ammo for a weapon would be left behind if you dragged a weapon out of the Primary Slot rather than using right-click unequip. The next weapon then ends up with the wrong ammo loaded and crashes the game when you try to fire it.

This is hopefully the final hotfix for Beta Build V11, currently only available on the Experimental Branch. Unless we've accidentally added some new critical bugs into the game we'll be pushing this out onto the Stable branch and making it the default build for all users later this week. So it'd be great if you guys could give it a little test! Changelog: Armour modules should no longer unequip after every ground mission. Fixed a random crash at the start of mission caused by the game trying to save while the field of view calculations were still being processed. Fixed a lockup that could occur in a ground combat mission when a human or alien plasma grenade was used. Soldiers equipped with "extra armour" now use the heavy armour model in the ground combat missions. Custom soldiers now display their faces correctly. The Exosuit armour is no longer invisible on the Soldier Equip screen. Fixed a bug that could crash the game if you dragged an item back into the stores on the Soldier Equip screen, rather than using the RMB unequip or drag+drop replace functionality. Gameplay / Balance Changes: The Pegasus advanced dropship has been disabled (we've got a bit of a problem we need to address in the map editor before we can export enough maps with the new dropship in it, so we'll hopefully be re-enabling it when the new maps arrive in V12 or V13). Extra Armour now weighs 20 instead of 5. Please continue to report any bugs you encounter in V11 on our dedicated bug report forums, and please give any thoughts on the game balance in this thread.

Modular weapons probably won't require much more work to implment now because they use a lot of the same code as modular armour. Problem is, I'm not sure weapons benefit anywhere near as much from being modular than armour does (and the UI interaction is going to be a lot more clunky). We'll have another think once we're in Early Access and see if there's a way we can implement it without things getting ridiculously complex. Afraid not, no - there's currently no way to buy access to the game until we launch into Early Access. There's a mailing list you can sign up for here, as we'll be sending out an email when the game goes on sale again: https://goldhawkinteractive.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=fc840addefb2d97f2d4d99c8d&id=57c4ad73dd

The Reapers come back from the dead? That's definitely a bug. The only case that should happen is if you kill a zombie, which then hatches a Reaper. It's possible that maybe this is incorectly being applied to all Reapers? The other stuff isn't necessarily final, no. Although I'm not sure I see any inherent problem in the Androns being large

Thanks. Looks like the image names are incorrect on the Exosuit so it's finding the wrong thing. I'll get it fixed!

Think we've fixed this, the fix should arrive in V12!

Thanks, I can reproduce this. I'll ask the coders to take a look tomorrow, it's definitely an annoying issue.

Thanks. Looks like there's a mis-set asset somewhere, we'll try to get it fixed for the next Hotfix.

It's based on random chance, so it's possible you've just got "unlucky" several times in a row there.

Yeah, I suspect I'm going to enforce a cap on the number of vehicles that can be brought onto a mission - probably one in the Chinook, and then an additional one for each level of advanced dropship. It kinda makes sense that a vehicle is more useful than an individual soldier because you have to invest research and manufacturing time into researching it, building it and keeping it upgraded, but if so we need to limit their numbers otherwise people will just want to replace all their soldiers with vehicles.

Yeah, we do in the ground combat - I was talking about in the strategy layer where the MARS will have painted art in the same way that the soldiers do.