Chris

I think the satchel charges are actually borderline overpowered, and I guess it's interesting that their use isn't intuitive to an inexperienced player. They do damage to a target and can blow up the cover they are hiding behind, making them much easier to hit and finish off. They're also great for taking out a wall if you need to create line of fire to an enemy that's currently hidden, or just to make a hole in a wall to save TU so your soldiers don't have to walk a long way to get to a door or something. I think they can also take out the doors on a UFO, which can make attacking it easier.

Hmmm, yeah. Looks like it is set too low - it should be roughly double what it is currently. Thanks.

Thanks. This will hopefully be fixed in V27 which will be released soon.

Yeah, you will. Those fixes will be arriving in V28, which isn't too far away.

This is the fifth hotfix for V27 and should be the last. This update does not break save games. Changelog: Added artwork for the Quantum Teleportation and Mentarch Interrogation research projects. Added updated research text for various research projects, including Alenium Explosives, UFO Hull Plating and Observer UFO. Fixed a crash that occurs when you try to start an Alien Base mission. Fixed most types of dead enemy units standing up in a T-pose if you loaded a save game. Explosions that don't inflict damage (e.g. smoke grenades, flashbangs, etc) no longer destroy items on the ground.

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

Yeah, that's the finished art. It meant to look like a smaller version of the larger clip. If you don't like it then that's fair enough, but it's not a bug

Thanks. Yeah, this is a weird bug that has been around for a while but we've not yet been able to fix. Sometimes certain objects that are normally destroyed correctly just don't get destroyed visually. But we don't know what caused it, or why. Do you remember what weapon hit it and what you were doing at the time?

Thanks. Yeah, this is a known issue but hopefully we'll find time to fix it before Early Access!

Thanks. Yeah, this is a bug I discovered myself when testing V27 on the Experimental branch so it should be fixed after the next update!

Thanks. Yeah, I think this affects pretty much all the aliens. We'll get the bug that's causing this fixed for the next hotfix and then if you see any more T-posing after that, please do report it.

@maxm222 Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad you've found V27.4 enjoyable - although something would have gone quite badly wrong if it wasn't the best version of the game so far! The civilian AI is still incredibly basic, as we've not done any work on AI for a couple of years now and it's something we're planning to address fully in Early Access. I'm certainly willing to change up terror missions a little so they have more of a timer, but it's something we need to consider carefully - I'm not sure whether players would like lots of missions having a timed element, rather than just some of them. XCOM2 certainly got a frosty reception when it tried that. As for the dialogue, yeah, again this is something I'm willing to listen to feedback on. But I think I'll need to get quite a lot of opinions on it before I start making any changes. The logic of the conversation is that both the Commander (you) and the Operations Director are stood around the command table in the command room of your base when this is happening, but I can see how some of the lines could be confusing if you didn't already know that. I guess the "Get in" line could be tweaked to say "Your soldiers need to get in" to make it more obvious what the setup is. Would that have made it less confusing for you?

Hello everyone - May is now over so it's time for our monthly update to explain the progress we've made. Early Access Launch Date: The first thing to mention is we now have a date for our Early Access launch. I don't know exactly when it will be revealed because our marketing partners Hooded Horse are handling the announcement, but we're just focused on getting the game as good as possible for that date (which is really not that far away)! Please be aware that the Early Access version of the game is going to cut off after about 60-70% of the full campaign. This is still a big chunk of the game - depending on how quickly you play tactical missions, you could easily spend 10-15 hours playing a campaign before you hit that point. Ultimately we had to make a decision between spending our time working on polish and bugfixes that affect the whole game, or fixing various issues (and adding some missing content) that only relate to the final section of the game. In the end we thought people would prefer to play a 15+ hour chunk of Xenonauts 2 that would hopefully leave them impressed and keen to play the final game, rather than release the entire campaign in a less polished state that they might enjoy less. We will be adding back the removed content during Early Access, once we've had a chance to test it and polish it up to the standards of the rest of the game. Current Goals: Our current goal is to make sure the playable parts of the game are as enjoyable as possible. One important goal is to ensure all the research text and art in the playable sections is ready, so I've been working hard on that (along with a number of illustrators). We're also working on lots of bugfixes and usability improvements, and adding little quality-of-life features requested by the community - e.g. you can now rotate soldiers when arranging them inside the dropship on the strategy layer. If there's any time left over, we'll try and add some new maps too. We're not going to be making any further large changes to the game until after the Early Access launch, as we want to avoid introducing new bugs. It's always important to have the game as stable as possible on launch! Completed Work: Now I've discussed our future plans, I'll quickly summarise the work we did last month in the space I have left: We released Closed Beta build V27 onto the Experimental branch, along with four hotfixes that fixed a LOT of bugs. We'll be hotfixing a few more issues this week and then hopefully releasing it on the Steam / GOG main branch. More work on the translation. As mentioned above, quite a lot of work on the research text / research artwork. We did some more work on the new Geoscape icons. We fixed the memory leaks in the game, which were causing performance issues and eventual crashes if you played the game for an extended session. This involved upgrading a copy of our codebase into the most recent version of Unity (as the version we're using is so old it doesn't have the tools required to easily find memory leaks), which is good news - after the Early Access launch, we'll probably upgrade the main project to this new version of Unity too. This should improve performance and compatibility, as well as making the lives of the developers easier. There's a few more smaller things we worked on that probably aren't worth talking about, as this post is already rather long. That's all I have for this month, so thanks for reading the post and I'll make another post once our release date is announced!

The main reason is that there's not much we can actually re-use from Xenonauts 1 in Xenonauts 2, other than ideas - and ideas aren't really the time consuming part of development. What that means is that creating X2 from scratch takes longer than creating X1 from scratch, because it's a larger game overall as it contains every feature from the first game plus a bunch more stuff we've added, and because it's a higher quality product and it takes a lot more time to produce something that is higher quality than something that is medium quality. Also, we spent a good couple of years working on a vision of Xenonauts 2 that was quite different to the final form of the game (lots of it described on our Kickstarter page) that just turned out not to be much fun to play. So we either had the choice of putting out a bad game, or changing the design to something better and throwing away a load of work. It's a sequel in the style of a Civilization sequel - it's not a fundamentally different story or set of mechanics, it's the same basic formula with a bunch of upgrades. Evolution rather than revolution. You'll have to decide for yourself whether the game is enough of a change from X1 to be worth buying, but I personally think it's a big upgrade over X1 (although I own quite a few different Civilization games so maybe I'm biased).

Thanks. Yeah, something strange is happening here. It shouldn't be possible to gain more than +2 in an attribute per battle, so you're correct that something is going wrong here. I'll take a look. As for the slow stat gain, it's because of diminishing returns. You can only get 2000 points of progress in each stat per battle (no matter how long the battle is), and at the start of the game it is 1000 progress points to level up a stat. But after you have +5 in a stat, you need 1250 points to level up so you can't level up twice per mission (unless you have left over points from a previous mission). Once you have +15 in a stat, you then need 3000 points per level up so it's not even possible to level up purely based on a single mission (unless you have left over points from a previous mission). It goes all the way up to 5000 points per level above +30 in a stat. I might tweak the numbers to make this work a little better, but overall the mechanic seems to be working fine - it makes farming stats very difficult beyond a certain point, and your soldiers already have very high stats.

Thanks. Does the crash always happen when you reload the smoke launcher then? I can't reproduce it from the save, and the logs don't contain any errors either - which is really strange. I'm wondering if this crash is actually from a memory leak, as that can cause the game to close unexpectedly. If so, this crash would be fixed in the next major update (but probably not hotfix).

Thanks. I can't reproduce this one either though. Blood and damage seems to work fine for me if I save and then load, or use the save you provided.

Thanks. We'll fix this one too, along with the other T-pose animation.

Thanks. Yeah, I can reproduce this - we'll get it fixed and put out a hotfix.

Thanks. Yeah, I can reproduce this. We'll get it fixed.

That's fine. Post them up, it's possible I was unaware of them in Xenonauts 1. Or it might just be that they're too difficult to fix. Just explain what they are I'll give it a read!

Thanks. Looks like I've set something up wrong there. I'll take a look and get it fixed.

Thanks. That's weird, I can't reproduce this in the save game. If I try recreating the loadout in your screenshot then drop the medikit, it works fine. If you're able to reproduce the bug again please let me know and I'll take another look.

Hey - yeah, it's good to post them. Can you just post a thread on the General forums though about exploits? It's not technically a bug so we shouldn't post it here. I'll give it a read and consider what fixes we might need to make.

Thanks for the report and save game. We'll get this fixed.