Chris

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 is just a quick additional fix for one of the more frustrating bugs remaining in 2.19! Changes: Fixed soldiers sometimes getting stuck in "Recovering <1 day" state.

Please stop tagging me in this thread - there's lots of people making suggestions in lots of different places and I do my best to stay on top of it all, but I've got a lot of different things to manage and work on so my time is limited. It's not fair on other forum posters who are also making suggestions to send me notifications about one particular thread (or it'll just encourage everyone to tag me in every thread, which I definitely don't want either). Anyway, which number 3 are you referring to? Several people have posted lists of suggestions in this thread at this point.

This is a stability and minor balance fix that we're pushing out to all players on our default Steam / GOG / Epic branches. The consolidated changelog for this update is below, representing all changes from Milestone 2.17 to Milestone 2.19 on our Experimental branch. We will be continuing to patch Milestone 2 to fix any stability issues that people encounter so please continue to report any issues! (we're working on a fix for soldiers getting stuck in the recovering state right now) Balance / Gameplay Changes: Reduced the manufacture times of all aircraft equipment. Reduction is greatest for the starting items (where it is close to 50%). Stun Gun is now correctly sellable / transferrable. Reload time for Sidewinders and other light missiles in air combat reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds. Added "Planned Loadout" label when viewing unassigned soldiers, and added a pop-up notification to explain the concept (which is that soldiers only claim items when assigned to a dropship, so unassigned soldiers instead have a "planned" loadout) as this was confusing many players. This feature exists so soldiers will automatically return all items to the stores when removed from a dropship for any reason (e.g. getting wounded), but will still remember their previous loadout and automatically try to re-equip it if reassigned. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that would occur on the Geoscape if you ended a month with negative cash balance due to upkeep costs. Fixed a crash that would occur if you tried to drag a "ghost" item on an unassigned soldier back into the base stores. Fixed a crash that could occur at end of turn after manually reloading an Advanced Laser Weapon. Fixed a crash that could occur if you failed in an assault against a Landed UFO, then later attacked a Crash Site from the same UFO. Fixed a crash caused by players putting ^ characters in soldier names and then attempting to start a tactical mission (this character is no longer permitted in names). Fixed the Phantom interceptor not regenerating its own basic armour unless it has an Armour item equipped. Fixed several issues with building adjacency bonuses that could occur when building upgrades happened, which caused them to be lower than they should. Fixed aircraft losing their firing targets (and therefore refusing to fire missiles) if you clicked on the targeted UFO a second time. Fixed Automed Unit regeneration incorrectly occurring after bleeding wounds inflicted damage. Fixed soldiers with the combat shield not using the correct animation set if their other hand has a melee weapon or is empty, as opposed to carrying a pistol. Fixed fleeing soldiers visually carrying their primary weapon as they run, even though they'd already dropped it. Fixed buildings in destroyed bases still costing upkeep. Fixed various sections of the text incorrectly displaying in English even when you had a different language enabled. Fixed ammo quantity for equipped weapons on the Soldier Equip screen not being shown. Fixed the Cleaner Soldier autopsy research report showing the interrogation image instead. Fixed the Rescue VIP missions displaying the objective "Make contact with VIP" when the VIP now starts under your control already. Fixed various UI issues that could occur if you destroyed a lab / workshop in a base, and tried to go down to 0 scientists or engineers. Fixed an issue where manually reloading a weapon with an empty clip in the tactical inventory would give you back the old clip with 0 shots. Fixed a minor bug that could cause soldiers who had been hit with several attacks to sustain extra bleeding wounds. Fixed stacked containers having an upper container with a destroyed state that could be left hovering in mid-air. Fixed the air combat target image for each interceptor not always updating correctly at the start of the battle. Fixed a minor issue in the tutorial where the Soldier Equip screen was interactable even though it shouldn't be. Fixed a number of visual issues with walls / props in the underground military base tileset that would occur when those assets were partially in the shroud.

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! Changes: Added "Planned Loadout" label when viewing unassigned soldiers, and added a pop-up notification to explain the concept (which is that soldiers only claim items when assigned to a dropship, so unassigned soldiers instead have a "planned" loadout) as this was confusing many players. This feature exists so soldiers can automatically return all items to the stores when removed from a dropship for any reason (e.g. being wounded), but will still remember their previous loadout and try to re-equip it if reassigned. Fixed a crash that could occur if you failed in an assualt against a Landed UFO, then later attacked a Crash Site from the same UFO. Fixed aircraft losing their firing targets (and therefore refusing to fire missiles) if you clicked on the targeted UFO a second time. Fixed Automed Unit regeneration incorrectly occurring after bleeding wounds inflicted damage. Fixed soldiers with the combat shield not using the correct animation set if their other hand has a melee weapon or is empty, as opposed to carrying a pistol. Fixed buildings in destroyed bases still costing upkeep. Properly fixed the issue with advanced laser weapons potentially causing crashes at end of turn when manually reloaded.

Thanks. Yeah, we're aware of this one. Unfortunately we can't figure out what's causing it, and we can't fix it until we know the cause. If you have any information about what you were doing before the bug happened then that might help us track it down. Do you use the Shift move path shot preview functionality a lot? A previous version of this bug was linked to that.

Thanks. 1) should be fixed in our next major update, 2) I've fixed just now by updating the achievement to read "hostile units", and I'll fix 3) to refer to hostile units too. 4) is intended behaviour.

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! Changes: Reload time for Sidewinders and other light missiles in air combat reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds. Fixed a crash that could occur at end of turn after manually reloading an Advanced Laser Weapon. Fixed various sections of the text incorrectly displaying in English even when you had a different language enabled. Fixed an issue where upgrading to advanced workshops / labs could cause you to lose the adjacency bonuses. Fixed ammo quantity for equipped weapons on the Soldier Equip screen not being shown. Fixed the Cleaner Soldier autopsy research report showing the interrogation image instead. Fixed the Rescue VIP missions displaying the objective "Make contact with VIP" when the VIP now starts under your control already. Fixed various UI issues that could occur if you destroyed a lab / workshop in a base, and tried to go down to 0 scientists or engineers. Fixed an issue where manually reloading a weapon with an empty clip in the tactical inventory would give you back the old clip with 0 shots. Fixed a minor bug that could cause soldiers who had been hit with several attacks to sustain extra bleeding wounds. Fixed stacked containers having an upper container with a destroyed state that could be left hovering in mid-air. Fixed the air combat target image for each interceptor not always updating correctly at the start of the battle.

Thanks. Weirdly enough I can't reproduce this from the save you provided, but the logs are helpful. We're releasing an update onto Experimental today that we think might fix this.

Thanks. I think we've identified the crash now - it's linked to reloading an advanced laser weapon. We're working on a fix. (The "resolve_layers" file isn't something we need though, that's something that we use when a map isn't loading for some reason. The saves and the output.log are the critical things we need!)

Thanks for all the posts and feedback, we'll pass this on to the translator and fix what we can.

Hmm, I'm guessing that Ausputzer translates as "sweeper" rather than "cleaner" then, given the football reference?

We should be fine - as part of their attempts to calm the situation they made a very public promise you could keep using the terms of service of the current version you're using if you wanted (and tbh legally it'd be difficult for them to change that even if they wanted to). Unity 2022 is the last version before their revenue share model kicks in so X2 is fine.

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! Balance / Gameplay Changes: Reduced the manufacture times of all aircraft equipment. Reduction is greatest for the starting items, where the reduction is just over 50%. Stun Gun is now correctly sellable / transferrable. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that would occur on the Geoscape if you ended a month with negative cash balance due to upkeep costs. Fixed a crash that would occur if you tried to drag a "ghost" item on an unassigned soldier into the Armory. Fixed an issue where soldiers could get stuck in the "Recovering" state. Created a custom character blacklist for the text input fields in the game, as putting ^ characters in soldier names will cause the game to crash loading a tactical mission. Fixed the Phantom interceptor not regenerating its own basic armour unless it has an Armour item equipped. Fixed several issues with building adjacency bonuses that could occur when building upgrades happened, which caused them to be lower than they should. Fixed fleeing soldiers visually carrying their primary weapon as they run, even though they'd already dropped it. Fixed a minor issue in the tutorial where the Soldier Equip screen was interactable even though it shouldn't be. Fixed a number of visual issues with walls / props in the underground military base tileset that would occur when those assets were partially in the shroud.

Hi - sorry, Kouki is misunderstanding what you're saying. The greyed out equipment for Unassigned soldiers represents a loadout preview - it's them "remembering" their previous loadout. However, the items themselves aren't actually equipped (which is why they're greyed out). Wounded soldiers or any soldier removed from the dropship for any reason automatically release their items for other soldiers to use, but they'll try to equip them again from the base stores if you put them back in the dropship. So it's not a bug, but I can see how it could be confusing.

Destroying cover and destroying walls are somewhat different things though. I think it's important to give players tools to remove walls from the very outset because it hugely increases the opportunities for cool plays, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm against making certain types of cover robust enough that they can't be removed with a single demo grenade.

So broadly speaking I'm happy with the balance of all the "main" weapon types, including the LMG. People will frequently say one type of weapon is weak but then I'll hear another player say the same type of weapon is actually really strong, and I think a lot comes down to playstyles. The HEVY is an exception there, although I'm still not entirely sure what changes I want to make to it. But I don't really agree that all heavy weapons are entirely useless. I'd also rather not nerf the demolition grenades (the eventual goal is to fold the remote detonation mode of the C4 into the demo grenades, then remove the C4 entirely). Being able to destroy the scenery easily opens up so many tactical options that I don't really want gated behind heavy weapon soldiers - it's a fun mechanic that makes the game far more interesting. The answer is probably to make the HEVY stronger rather than taking anything away from demo grenades. As for the point about high Strength being a boring choice in the game because of the new Heavy Armour checkbox - I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this. I think there's definitely diminishing returns to high Strength, but choosing between heavy armour, an extra magazine, a demo grenade or a stun baton etc is quite a big choice when soldiers don't have huge Strength. Especially when you're using advanced weapons with smaller clips in them. But I'm happy to listen to what the community thinks about it. For the air combat - there has been a balancing pass done on the air combat now. We are continuing to work on the balance and will revamp the visuals, and maybe add some new equipment too, but you can certainly see the outlines of system by now. So feel free to give feedback on how we should improve it. Although we're already looking into reducing the build times for aircraft equipment. The damage on air combat weapons is already a random range now (50%-150% per shot, like in ground combat). Hit chances are supported but don't work well mechanically, particularly with missiles and other projectiles that score hits based on physical positioning / evasion, so they're all set to 100%. We did experiment with a system where aircraft took a long time to repair (in fact they still take much longer than in X1) but I don't think even one person said they enjoyed it, and we got loads of complaints about repair times being too long! One thing we could potentially try here is to break up the UFO "waves" where the UFOs spawn in large groups roughly every couple of weeks, and just have a couple of UFOs spawning every 4-7 days. Then you're much more likely to encounter a situation where your plane is damaged and you can't send it up again. But it does mean you game will be continuously interrupted by UFOs spawning, which really started to annoy me in the late-game in X-Com.

Thanks for letting us know!

I'm putting this update out on both our standard branches and the Experimental branch, as the previous Stable update contained a serious bug we need to fix. Bugfixes: Fixed a bug where attempting to start a VIP rescue mission would cause the game to crash. Fixed a crash where wounded soldiers could incorrectly end up assigned to a dropship and then sent to a mission.

Thanks, we’ll get this fixed.

Does the cancel moves button on the tactical inventory allow you to get the TUs back from unloading weapons?

Thanks - you’re correct, this is an error from a previous milestone that I’ll get fixed in the next patch.

Hello everyone - we've reached the end of November, so it's time for our monthly development update. This month has been fairly intense but once again the project has made good progress. Milestone 2: The biggest news this month has been the official release of Milestone 2, our first major update since our Early Access launch. I discussed the many upgrades made in Milestone 2 in our previous update so I won't cover them again, but getting everything ready for this release took up most of the month. Our thanks go out to all the testers who were reporting bugs and giving gameplay feedback on the Experimental branches over the past couple of months, as it has been incredibly valuable! Broadly speaking, all this testing meant Milestone 2 launched in pretty good shape - but we've already patched a few major bugs and put out a fix for the funding situation being overly restrictive on the easier difficulty settings. We're continuing to monitor stability and balance issues, so please do let us know if you're encountering problems and we'll consider further patches! Milestone 3: Although Milestone 2 is barely out the door, we're already hard at work on Milestone 3. This update contains the alien Cruiser UFO, which is crewed by aliens carrying deadly Fusion weapons. If you can successfully capture one of these Cruisers, you can unlock the final interceptor and dropship aircraft, plus another tier of infantry weapons and an upgrade for the MARS that turns it into a hovertank. We'll also be continuing to work on the alien AI and the air combat, and we're hoping to add various minor community-requested features into this update too (e.g. the ability to autosell "junk" items after combat). Finally, we're expecting Milestone 3 will have significantly improved loading times compared to earlier versions of the game! Unity 2022 Upgrade: These faster load times will be happening partly because we're in the process of upgrading from Unity 5.5 to Unity 2022. We've already done the necessary technical work for this, but there's always teething issues with a major engine upgrade, so I expect we'll have to spend a couple more weeks fixing things up before things are fully back to normal. Players should see faster load times and better performance when this work is complete, along with proper support for multiple monitors and borderless windowed mode etc. It will also make development work more efficient, as the codebase compiles much more quickly etc. Finally, it'll also bring us one step closer to mod tools - as some of the work we'll be doing upgrading our internal editor tools could be re-used to create a more effective mod editor. I think I'll wrap things up there. If all goes well, we might have an early prototype of Milestone 3 ready for people to play on the Experimental branch by mid-December (if not, it'll be early January). Thanks for reading!

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 is a patch for our recent Milestone 2 update that attempts to address some balance issues, and fix a few bugs. Balance / Gameplay Changes: Soldiers once again only drop their Primary weapon if they Panic. VIP should now start under the player's control on the Extract VIP missions. Starting funding increased by $500k on all difficulties except Commander. Base monthly funding increased by ~10% per region, which increases the post-expenses monthly income by ~20% at the start of the game. Monthly funding multipliers for Recruit difficulty have increased from 1.2x to 1.25x, and have decreased from 0.9x to 0.8x for Commander difficulty (so funding remains similar to the current build on Commander). Alien weapons recovered from the battlefield now award 1 Alloy each instead of 2 Alloys, and the Alloys awarded from capturing UFOs have been reduced by 20%. Scout UFO now awards slightly more Alenium when captured. Bugfixes: Attempted to fix a display bug that could occur if players have two monitors, and have their second display set as their primary monitor in Windows. Fixed the UI not updating correctly if you switch a HEVY out of the Primary slot, causing the new weapon to display like it was loaded with HEVY ammo. Zombies (and other units that are immune to stun damage) now display a "0" above their heads when they would normally suffer stun damage.

Yeah, it's on the public early access branches now. And sure, you're welcome to do a video on the changes if you'd like to!

We can either drop just the Primary, the selected weapon, or both weapons. Dropping only the selected weapon is way easy for people to game (they'd always switch at end of turn), and I feel like dropping the Primary weapon only is a bit silly in some circumstances (like Shield + Pistol). So I decided on the other option. If people feel this change negatively impacts the game we can always change it back. I'm not too bothered either way; I just think dropping both makes most sense.