Chris

Thanks. Yeah, I think I missed this first time around. We'll take a look at the weirdness that's happening here.

Yeah. I think it is compatible, broadly speaking - but I think maybe my inability to reproduce it is caused by you having some older data in your campaign. If I try and reproduce the sequence of actions then I get a different outcome (and units take different damage etc). It's no big thing. If this is a "proper" crash that's not caused by out of date data then I imagine someone else will encounter it soon enough and hopefully we'll be able to fix it then.

Hmm. I just tried again and I still can't. Did you start this campaign in V26.3 or did it begin in an earlier version of the game?

Yeah, it's the same bug. I thought it was fixed but it's apparently not.

Yeah, this is a good point. Thanks. We should add a bit more info to this panel if the quantum decoder is around.

Thanks - this should be fixed in V27. Don't be shy about reporting this type of annoyance, it makes the game better for everyone when we get them fixed!

Yeah, many of the tactical combat bugs haven't been. The coder responsible for that has mostly been working on the tutorial and now the translation, so there's not been as much time as we'd like for bugfixes.

Thanks. Yeah, I know what this issue is. I'll get it fixed.

Hmmm. Seems to load fine for me, but I'll discuss the crash logs with the programmers and see if there's anything we can discover from them.

Hmmm. Yeah, this is a problem with the way the cabbages are set up. I'll just switch it for a different type of field.

Thanks. Yeah, this seems to affect any alien unit that doesn't have a humanoid rig. We'll hopefully be able to get it fixed for V27.

Ah, yeah. Just a little typo at my end. I'll fix that, thanks.

Thanks. This is weird; I can't seem to reproduce it even if I follow the steps in your video. We'll take a look at the logs to see if we can figure out what the problem might be.

Yeah, this is because of the bug where the strength bonuses aren't being applied correctly. Units shouldn't be getting a TU penalty when their carry weight isn't maxed out, as is happening in that screenshot. We'll re-evaluate the Colossus balance once that bug is fixed.

Thanks. Yes, I can reproduce this. We'll take a look and get it fixed.

Thanks. That's weird, and the ground texture is missing too. I'll take a look.

Yeah, the two builds are identical in gameplay terms so you can transfer between them with no issue.

Ah, that's really great. Yeah, I can reproduce it from this too now. Appreciate the time you spent digging into this a lot - should be easy to fix now!

@Emily_F great job, thanks!

You're not necessarily meant to commit fully to all the weapon tiers. Accelerated weapons, Lasers and Gauss weapons can all be unlocked within the first three months of the game and you're not really meant to have enough resources to build a full set of all of them. Awkwardly, though, a lot of people don't see it that way and will grind for resources to make sure that they can. I suppose an improved setup might be to have a couple of upgrades for Lasers / Gauss / Fusion weapons, which get unlocked at roughly the same time as the next tier of weapons gets unlocked. Then the player is presented with a more obvious choice of committing to the next tier of weapons or powering up the ones they already have (with the latter being more powerful initially). Hopefully people wouldn't really feel the need to grind resources for a weapon tier that they're not really using.

@Twigg @Kamehamehayes thanks both, that's useful stuff. To reply quickly to some of the points: Twigg: Yeah, this is broadly in line with my understanding of the game state. The air combat is pretty bad right now and needs work to be made interesting, and the game gets boring and repetitive after day ~150 or so. We will address both of these things in time but we're spread too thin right now and we're likely to concentrate on polishing the first 150 days for Early Access. Your thoughts on the vehicles are interesting. Maybe we'll add a lighter scout unit during Early Access but right now the MARS is designed primarily for killing (or terrain destruction). No, it can't be repaired on the battlefield, as it's already borderline OP in my opinion. However it does instantly heal to full health after the mission. Many of the issues you've mentioned are bugs, like the crash site bounty and the Gauss Blaster etc. They should be fixed in V27. There is a possible case that allows aliens to teleport around the base, although I'm not sure if it's actually happening, which is just that one or more of the teleporters is set up incorrectly and therefore transporting units to the wrong place. But this would affect Xenonaut units in the same way if they tried to use it and I've not seen that reported. Kamehamehayes: I'll get the tooltips set up to display ammo regen properly for V27. I thought they were already doing it. It's a few hours of work but nothing outrageous. The laser weapons already regen substantially more rounds than other types of weapons, and in general the assumption is that you have effectively unlimited ammo with them. I've removed the Alloy cost on the advanced base turret upgrades now. You should still be able to build Alenium once you've researched it. No, you can't dismantle the weapons etc any more. It just seemed a bit fiddly to include given you pretty much always wanted to be doing it. It's a tough balance because if you have the player recover a resource rather than the weapon itself (e.g. weapon fragments, or alloys / alenium) then people get confused as to why they've not recovered a weapon. But the UI doesn't handle it very elegantly if you have to break them down on the strategy layer. I could just make those weapons usable by players at reduced Accuracy compared to the aliens, I guess. But I'm not sure putting even more weapons in the game really helps anything. Suppose it would be cool in the ground combat battles to be able to pick them up if you need though. The question about the Alien Plasma Weapons is an interesting one. I think you're right that having both Guardian Battle Armour and Improved Lasers unlocked immediately is probably overkill. One of those two projects should also require Alien Electronics to unlock, and possibly Guardian Armour should be a research project in its own right rather than something that autocompletes. I think I might make Guardian Armour something you need to research, and maybe also make the starting Combat Armour an early research project and then move Warden Armour up another tier. Then there's not too much of a gap between getting the Warden and the Guardian. Although the amount of armour suits in the game is kinda ridiculous at this point as almost every UFO unlocks a new suit of armour. That said, the danger here is adding another 3 research projects to the tech tree (as the Warden and Guardian currently auto-unlock) when the early game is already very crowded. If so I'll leave Improved Lasers where it is. Lasers are meant to be superior to Accelerated weapons overall, certainly when upgraded, as they're intended to be quite a bit more expensive. Thing is that Gauss Weapons unlock off Alien Electronics too so in theory the question is perhaps more Accelerated >> Gauss or Lasers >> Improved Lasers >> Fusion Weapons? Although I'm not sure if that works in practice. In general I think I'm fine with certain weapon tiers having a particular type of weapon that's a bit OP and another that's a bit weak. If the Laser sniper rifle is weak but the LMG is great, that probably actually ends up being a bit more interesting than them all being a straightforward upgrade imo.

Thanks. All suggestions are of course welcome but generally these options are either going to cover things that the existing difficulty settings already change (e.g. starting funds, monthly funds, numbers of aliens, alien Accuracy boost, soldier base survival chance, etc) or specific things where we've changed the formula from Xenonauts or classic X-Com and players might reasonably want to change it back (which is why I used the "not showing health above enemies heads" example). I guess I'm casting around to see if there's anything in the second category that I might have missed. More granular control of difficulty may well be something we add in time, but it won't be in the first draft. It is interesting to see all the suggestions for the things we can tweak though. The option to reveal the entire map at the start of the battle is possibly one that might be worth looking at. It's probably not hard to do and while I think it would make the game less fun, I'm not necessarily against allowing players to play the game that way if they really want to.

I'm currently scoping out our expanded campaign options, which will allow players to fine-tune the difficulty of the campaign a bit if they want. As part of this we may also add various options that allow people to change certain aspects of the gameplay too. If you've got any requests for game options that don't currently exist, please post them up here and I'll consider them. For example: An option to disable displaying the Health numbers above the enemy heads etc

Q2 is probably still on the cards, yeah. Assuming the translation work goes reasonably smoothly.

Hello everyone! February is now over so it's time for our monthly progress update. The biggest thing that happened this month was Steam Next Fest. We put out a demo for this that allowed players to play the full game for just over a month and included our new tutorial. This was the first time we've allowed people to play more than a curated single mission, so it was quite a nerve-wracking experience, but overall I think things went well - we got a lot of new wishlists and a lot of useful feedback. Steam Demo: Broadly speaking the feedback on the demo was good. I want to thank everyone that posted up their thoughts and suggestions either on Steam or on our forums or Discord, because it's been really useful to read those. Even the negative feedback has been very useful, because in most cases it revealed either bugs we were not aware of or parts of the game that need better communication or balancing. It's never nice to realise parts of your game don't work quite as well as you thought they did, but it's certainly much better to find that out before the Early Access launch than after! A lot of our time this month has therefore been spent working on the issues and problems people experienced in the demo. V26 Stable Released! This morning I released the final version of V26 onto our standard Steam and GOG branches, which is the first build to make it beyond our Experimental branches since November and should be a substantial improvement on the previous V24.7b. Thanks to all of the testers who made suggestions and reported bugs with V25 and V26! I'm currently working on V27 which will hopefully be arriving on the Experimental branches later this month. Translation: Based on the sales data provided by our marketing partners Hooded Horse, we've decided that it would be sensible to support translation for our Early Access launch. We're working on the technical implementation of this now and will hopefully have that finished this month (although the actual translation work will take a bit longer to deliver). Hooded Horse will be using professional translators to deliver high-quality translations into most major languages, but we also hope to make these tools available to the community in the future so people can translate the game into other languages if they wish. New Gameplay Changes: The two large gameplay changes we've been working on this month are the reskinning of the Soldier Equip screen into the new UI style and adding another unique tactical mission type. The new tactical mission is an "Eliminate VIP" mission, which in this case takes the form of an attack on a Cleaner outpost where the objective is to kill the Cleaner leader and escape before enemy reinforcements overwhelm you. This mission requires a bit of extra work because we're also adding some optional secondary objectives in the form of more computers that contain Cleaner Data that can be recovered, but hopefully it'll be another interesting new mission type to keep the campaign nice and varied to play. This all ties into a bigger revamp of the Cleaners which we'll be testing this month. I don't want to reveal too much about it until we've had a chance to properly playtest it, but the idea is to make the Cleaner mission sequence a bit more dynamic rather than their story just being a straightforward research chain. If all goes well people will be able to try this for themselves in V27. That's everything from me. As always, thanks for reading and we'll see you next month!