Chris

So all is stable and the aliens are behaving sensibly?

BTW, as the Steam release is tomorrow, if you have the time I would really appreciate people giving this a try. I want the stable version to be as stable as possible when we launch, for obvious reasons

Hotfix 3 includes all the changes from the prior hotfixes. To apply it, simply download the file from the link below and unzip it to your /xenonauts/ folder. Link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26290309/V18.51_hotfix3.rar In addition to the changes from Hotfix 1 (not many) and Hotfix 2 (a lot), the following updates have been made: AI should no longer be able to accurately "guess" where your troops are from beyond their sight range AI should no longer get extra free TUs The "take and hold" victory has been re-introduced, where you can win a crash site by clearing the UFO and keeping a unit inside it for 5 turns Stun grenades should no longer cause AI hangs Reloading a pistol in the off-hand no longer causes crashes MiG has 4 missile slots again. This will be reduced to 2 in V19 but the game is not balanced for it at the moment (causes some weird behaviour in the air combat too) Combat shield has been disabled, as it has historically been causing crashes in some circumstances. It will be back in all future versions but I'm not going to risk putting it in the Steam "stable release". Please report any crashes experienced in this build in this thread, and also post here if the AI is still obviously misbehaving. If there are no major crashes and the AI is working better than before, this will become V18.52 and the Steam Early Access release build. I'll get it ported to Mac / Linux and the Desura branches / standalones updated accordingly too.

There's a bug in the game where the alien bases will cost you relations score with a nation at the same rate whatever speed the Geoscape is going at. This makes the drain far too fast, and at present there's no real way to avoid losing a nation when a base is built there. That is not how it is intended to work. As it is, just accept you'll lose the territory and wait for your agents to detect it automatically.

Should be out in the next hour.

Steven - hopefully we'll send the next Mac build off to be ported either today or tomorrow.

Meh, mod it back in then. The text and research projects are still there, I've just set them not to unlock.

Ah yeah, I need to return this to having 4 missiles for the Steam build.

Incidentally, has anyone had any crashes? Is it just the AI that is a bit of a problem in the build?

Thanks for all the digging, fellas. I've forwarded GJ this thread and asked him to look into it. We were puzzled because we were trying to fix the game mechanics and couldn't find anything wrong...but it seems the issues are in the AI instead. Hopefully we can get it fixed today.

You will have been sent a Desura key to the Kickstarter email address. You need to use that to add Xenonauts to your Desura account first!

To help, you should load the Xenonauts_gc_editor version of the game. If you press U in the ground combat while playing in a window, the debug panel turns up and that will show movement as it happens and let you check (and change) the TUs and HP that a unit has. I think L also shows the map from an alien perspective, and Q / Ctrl+Q let you hide / reveal the map. It's possible our over-reliance on developer shortcuts means we miss a bit of how the game actually plays when you play it...

Bleh, it's been a long day and I can't really be bothered. But I guess it's poor form to release an update without a changelog. OP updated.

As soon as I can. It looks like it'll be after we go live, but I doubt it'll be more than a day or two. I'm still not fully familiar with the Steam backend, as it is pretty complex in parts.... heretically, I almost wish we were still using Desura!

If you're doing this you'll probably want to increase the weapon ranges too, as those are unrealistically short in part to compensate for the fact your soldiers are partially sighted at best.

I'd suggest that the rock is actually on the red tile and the image is misaligned.

Hehe, there is a building collapse function in the game that activates if you shoot out enough of the walls on a level. Seems it is malfunctioning a little there though...

This fix is an update for V18.51 and includes Hotfix 1 too. To use it, simply download the file and unzip the archive into your /xenonauts/ folder. Link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26290309/V18.51_hotfix2.rar CHANGELOG: Xenopedia now has an entry for every research project, some 31,000 words of it. It needs more editing though. Mission debrief "UFO Secured" scores reduced substantially to prevent the player getting so much of a funding increase after every mission. Aaron's first balance patch has been introduced, mostly affecting the ground combat: Alien races have been homogenised, so there currently is no stats differentiation between different races. The UFO crew size now increases linearly with size, starting with 4 crew in a Light Scout and going up to 16 in a Battleship. Weapon tiers are now identical to the tier before, but do additional damage. Zoom levels have fixed accuracy levels between weapons - level one zoom will always be (say) 50 accuracy, level 2 will be 75 accuracy etc. Weapons simply have different zoom levels and different TU costs for each level. We will add more variation back into the game once we have a solid game progression in place that we can use as a framework. There were too many variables at play previously. [*]Added difficulty settings back in. Aliens have 20% more health than normal on Veteran and 50% more on Insane. Easy mode they have 80% health and do 75% normal damage. BUGFIXES: Game no longer crashes on losing a combat mission. Civilians that bleed to death no longer automatically counted as killed by Xenonauts. Hidden Movement screen sound reduction now only applies on hidden movement (so when the image is being shown) Rocket launcher default ammo now updates as new rockets are unlocked. Game Over screen no longer appears behind terrain. Various level editor viewing fixes. Flashbangs no longer suppress through walls. A combat crash with invalid weapons has been fixed. Not sure what this one is tbh. You now get victory points for capturing a UFO even if you save / load. C4 now works properly with save / load. Let me know if it makes the game better to play, or if it has crashes in it. If it is clean, I will add it to the V18.51 release in time for the Steam release and call it V18.52, and that'll be the stable build we'll port to other platforms and keep for some time. I'd be particularly interested to see if the aliens still have vastly longer sight ranges than your men in this build. We couldn't actually replicate the issue in the dev build. Let me know if it's still affecting things! EDIT - it seems there's still some AI-related shenanigans, with it not playing by the same rules as you have to regarding TUs and LOS. It's still worth applying this hotfix because of the stability benefits, but the community have done some detective work on the causes of this and hopefully we'll have a hotfix 3 out soon.

The UI screens will all eventually have a first-time pop-up that explains what they do when you first access them. It's not ideal, but it should get the job done.

I'm gonna lock this thread.

The issue isn't easily addressed by reducing the cost of fighters. The fact that extremely cheap fighters is unrealistic isn't my main point, I'm just using that to illustrate that the alternative solution to fighters automatically performing an emergency combat disengage also requires you to test the bounds of possibility by twisting the setting so funding nations can build advanced interceptors in days, but are somehow incapable of building their own ones or providing other important services (like bases) for free too. This means "it's unrealistic" doesn't cut that much ice with me as a counterpoint to the automatic disengage feature. The key point is that most people who are against this feature speak of "dumbing down" the game by implementing it, but having planes with reduced cost also makes the game substantially easier as the planes essentially become expendable at that point - which they are certainly not at the moment. So why is that not also "dumbing down"? As I see it, having the planes cost more upfront and not be fully destroyable rather than it being a monthly drip-drip of replacing (cheaper) plane losses doesn't actually make the game any easier...it just makes skill at the air combat minigame significantly less important relative to the strategy and ground combat layers of the game, which is how it should be (the air combat is nowhere near as deep or interesting as the other parts of the game). Ultimately I'll think on the issue and make my own decision on what the final solution will be, so thanks for the views everyone has put forward. At least I know know it apparently isn't the slam-dunk of an idea that I thought it was.

But if we vastly reduce the cost and production time of aircraft, then you've got a situation where planes are presumably going to cost less and be faster to manufacture than a vehicle and not much more than a suit of advanced armour. So either you'll have to have planes be unrealistically fast to manufacture and cheap to build relative to other manufacturable items (making them essentially expendable), or you have to balance the game around the fact that you're expected to lose a few expensive planes along the way. But if you go for the latter, you're in a situation where if a player is good enough at the air combat not to lose planes, he won't have any money problems throughout the entire game because planes are expensive and it's not a cost they have to pay. If you're going to make planes expendable, I don't see why you wouldn't make them expensive but immune from permanent destruction. It's not like having expendable planes wouldn't make the game easier too.

Ah yes, it was indeed Lightzy's idea rather than StellarRat's. Updated OP accordingly. I imagine it can be added as a flag in gameconfig.xml or something - if it is on, when a plane reaches 0 health, it is not destroyed but (say) 5 days is added to the repair time when it gets back. Then there's a penalty for getting "shot down" relative to being "damaged". The "cost" associated with this is that you're without your plane for at least one, possibly two waves of UFOs...which leaves the funding nations undefended and reduces your funding.

Stinkspray - wouldn't you rather the difficult bit where you could lose the game was the ground combat, rather than the air combat? I don't think many people are interested in the game primarily because of the air combat minigame, hence why the issue of it being overly important at present arises.

And just a note here that it's really cool to see this number of extra maps available for those that find the Goldhawk ones too repetitive. Well done, everyone.