Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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On 11/28/2025 at 9:45 PM, st3fan21 said:
A good QOL feature would be to see the city names on the map in the Geoscape even when zoomed out, especially because you can see the red ones are already destroyed by the U00-1
I don't think this would be a good idea, because there's a lot of cities and the names take up a lot of screen space when you're fully zoomed out. It would look very cluttered (which is why we don't do it).
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On 12/1/2025 at 4:16 PM, Stricknine said:
Does the AI play by the same rules as the player when it comes to LoS and knowing the positions of units?
For example, if an alien sees one of my units, I assume that all aliens would know that unit's location and be able to act on that knowledge
But if an alien sees me during my turn and I move out of LoS, does the alien continue to track me outside of LoS, or does it use my last known location (and maybe even the direction it saw me go) to try to relocate me?
I ask this because in the original X-COM, certain aliens could track you outside of LoS for a number of turns, and I wasn't really a fan of this mechanic.
Not at the moment, no. Right now all aliens know exactly where all your soldiers are once they go into "combat mode" after sighting a hostile unit. We're looking to implement a fairer system in the next major update.
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Yes, that's a nice idea. It's probably quite a complex new mechanic though (because right now the game works on the assumption a unit can see everything in their vision range) but maybe it's something we could consider post-release.
Part of the issue with Stalker armour is that aliens won't take a shot unless they have a 30%+ chance of hitting. Which means if they're shooting at that soldier then they already have a good chance of hitting it. There's probably plenty of times the Stalker has prevented an alien actually firing a shot in the first place - but there's no indication that that has happened, so people don't notice. Does make we wonder if we can put the stalker check outside the normal AI calculation so it's more obvious what it's doing.
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On 11/28/2025 at 11:24 AM, st3fan21 said:
In the first Xenonauts it was called a different name but it had the same function and look.
It was better because even though it was not clearly specified it reduced the time units necesarry to shoot with weapons.
It was compatible with only the machinegun and one late game weapon (some kind of fusion missile launcher)
Now it has the power fist, which is awesome!!!
But it could use a small (maybe just 10% reduction for time units necesarry to shoot with weapons)Or it could benefit from a larger increase in armor protection from the upgrade it gets late game so it can stay relevant when you have Vanguard armour
UPGRADED COLOSSUS should have 100 armor or 80 armor plus a reduction in time units for firing weapons.
ALSO COLOSSUS ARMOR has no way to handle a medikit so they should be able to carry an automed module (it would also be realistic that such an armour would have emergency medical protection for it s occupant)
Thanks. Yes, we'll be looking at further improvements to the Colossus in the next major update!
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On 11/22/2025 at 9:36 AM, ADederer said:
Something seems off. Went from a solid game (just equipped Gauss, improved Guardian, did first Cruiser, no problem.
Terror mission was just rediculous. Ghosts and Andos eating 4 and 5 shots, reasonable shots (60%+) showed bullets going off at 30 degrees. Between massive bullet sponges (many with cloak) and Fusion guns I lost a MARS and 6 of 9 guys. Only thing I was short of was a Rocket MARS (which might have helped). I got the impression that something was wrong with my RNG at least.
Maybe de-link extra HP and Fusion guns? This was a MAJOR spike, and I was up-to-date. In a close campaign, this would likely have been a wipe.
Again, I also got the impression that RNG was not on the level, but part of that was that Fusions are near 1-hit kills, when I have to hit them 4-5 times before being hit twice, and they have numbers..
Sorry for the delay replying here. Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I'll bear this in mind when I do my next balancing playthrough - perhaps adding fusion weapons and much tougher enemies at the same time is a bit much.
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16 hours ago, Lighterius said:
First of all, I want apologize in advance for any and all grammar/spelling mistakes here as English in not my native language and hope I’ll be able convey what I mean.
2 years ago I rage quit the game and left a negative review on steam because I thought the game was simply not fun and extremely frustrating. And I always loved X-Com series since I was a kid. Really wanted to love this game as well.
2 weeks ago I decided to have another go at it and finished it on Commander difficulty. Did anything change? Well, I finished the game, so obviously - yes. I'm gonna change my steam review to positive and suggest the game to my friends (that is if they want to set their asses on fire). However, atm I don't think I can give it more than 7/10 (probably 6.5) (note that completely average game is 5/10, and 10/10 is an insane masterpiece).
The game has very very high potential and the devs really improved it, but there are still a lot of problems to be sorted. This is my take on it and would love to hear where I’m right or wrong. Also, note that this is an opinion for Commander difficulty only and things may work differently on lower levels.
Basic gameplay:
1. Freakishly insane randomness to the point where it's not even funny. And it expresses itself mostly in damage ranges which can vary anywhere between 2 and 60 even in phase 1 (strangely enough I’ve never seen damage 1, but 2 – multiple times). Why? What's the mechanic of damage calculation? I can't think of any plausible reason to valid this kind of range. And I couldn't get used to it even in the very end-game where it ranges between 2 (if you have armor) and 150. Which in turn leads to problem 2.
2. Way too many one-shots. It is a miracle if your soldiers survive even 1 hit. A lot of the time they don't, no matter what rank they are or what armor they wear. Maybe Colossus or Vanguard will forgive 1 hit on max medals Colonel, but even then I had a lot of one shots. That is not okay. I do not believe this game can be completed without getting shot at and every one of them can insta kill. I think it would benefit to double or even triple HPs. I don’t think anyone likes this mechanic because it is not skill based. If instant death mechanic is implemented in the game it should be telegraphed so players can avoid it with skill.
3. Save scumming is the only possible way to complete the game on Commander. I do not like save scumming, I always try to avoid it if possible, but as a player I just can't calculate anything. Enemies can appear from every crack - doors, corners, teleport pads - and simply kill. There is no warning and there is no real comeback mechanic. If your top squad dies - it's all downhill from here and game over. Suggestion: motion tracker, like in aliens movie. Maybe not precise location, but general direction and approximate range. Maybe to balance it - make it work only if enemies are moving certain distance or making noise (current sound effects are not enough).
4. Lack of variety. All enemies feel the same - they run around, they shoot gun. I couldn't care less what's in front of me - a lizard, a psyon or a wraith. They are all the same. The only enemy I loved and respected was the Cyberdrone (that flying roundy tanky thingy). Its design is extremely cool - you can either pour into it from the front with a lot of guys or use tactics to get behind it. Really awesome and would love to see more designs like that. All other enemies don't have anything special about them. Even eternals are dudes with guns. Suggestion: make every enemy have its own quirk. Wraiths are snipers who stay at maximum range and shoot, retreat when someone is getting close. Psyons don't have guns but can use psychic abilities that can inflict damage or induce panic (maybe soldiers’ will and psyshield will be useful then). Lizards can stay the way they are as frontline brutes. Androns can be straightforward weapons platform and have 2 different weapons but they don’t take cover or something like that. Remove reapers - they simply suck. Or at least make them feral, so they always charge player using the shortest path even if it leaves them in the open.
5. AI has maphacks. It always knows where player's soldiers are. Just remove it, please. It butchers any kind of tactical gameplay.
Tactical missions:
6. The lack of variety goes for mission types as well - there is not enough of them. In my playthrough I have completed 33 missions, 5 (?) of which were plot missions, 2 alien bases, 1 base defense, 2 terror missions and 1 abduct. I think the rest were UFO related. The 2 "free" UFO crashes are fine, don't make less of them, make more of other random missions pop up. And on terror missions Alenium bombs don't even work, it's the same pew-pew-pew mission.
7. Half of the armor types are useless and need rework. Enemies are always 1 level above in terms of weapons compared to player's armor and therefore Warden and Guardian armors don’t protection. If I left soldiers in Tactical armor it would feel absolutely the same - death in 1 shot. The first armor that really provides at least something new is Stalker (not survivability though). The first REAL armor is Colossus. Don't have any meaningful suggestions, maybe integrate simple exoskeleton to Guardian armor (+strength, +accuracy)? No idea what to do with Warden though.
8. Weapons were not created equally as well. In the early game I had to use mostly shotguns and rifles because of lack of TUs. Late game - shotguns and HMGs only. Other weapons just don't have enough firepower. I tried but couldn't figure out why would I bring sniper rifle, it requires a lot of TUs, doesn't have extreme amount of damage, doesn't headshot, has penalties for cover, and most maps don't have long corridors to shoot. Maybe if it ignored cover I'd find a place for it. Same goes for a rifle in the end-game, it has no redeeming quality compared to HMG which is simply a better rifle. Shotguns are fine.
9. Recruits don’t scale with difficulty as game progresses. New recruits are viable only in the first half of the game (phases 1,2,3 max). In phases 4 and 5 recruits just don’t have enough stats to compete with aliens and always die in 1 shot regardless of anything. And late-game random missions are insane in terms of difficulty, much harder than plot missions. I was researching Endgame and had a random terror mission pop up with wraiths/andrones/servitors as enemies. Tried to do it with a squad of Lts and got owned. Managed to kill 5 enemies on turn 1, then another 12 come from every direction and just annihilate Lts (all wearing either Colossus or Vanguard). I think I could have won with save scumming, but honestly, my thought was that I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t have problems with terror and didn’t need resources.
10. Corners are confusing. Sometimes I can't shoot when standing next to a corner but the enemy can shoot me. Why? Maybe if a rifle was nimble enough to shoot around the corner (with a penalty perhaps) than it would always have a use. Also I think soldiers should be able to peak or throw grenade around a corner when standing next to it. It's just common sense (?). Corners just feel weird in this game.
11. Overwatch is very bad and needs rework. You just can't rely on it. I had a situation when I had a firing line of 10 soldiers ready to breach a UFO (5 crouched + 5 behind them), all of them had TUs for a shot. Lizard opens the door, turns around, takes a couple of steps back, turns around, murders 3 guys with a volley. No overwatch. If I can't rely on it than why would I use it? Current overwatch requires player to sacrifice precious TUs for something that might not even trigger. This is most annoying when facing reapers, which can just waltz up to you and murder. Honestly, I think if a soldier has TUs left for a shot, then overwatch should always trigger on the first enemy movement.
12. Explosives and grenades feel very underwhelming. Booms should go big and hard. Grenade thrower and regular grenades can’t kill aliens in 3 hits in the late-game so I just stopped using explosives entirely. Explosions should just get a massive damage buff. Smoke on the other hand is fantastic, really awesome. Same goes for flashbang. But grenade throwing is a bit too expensive in terms of TUs, a 10-20% reduction in price would be cool.
Strategic map and aerial combat.
13. Operation points (OP) are the most valuable resource. You can buy cash, alenium and alloys, reduce panic and recruit supporters. So it seems a bit weird that most of it comes from passive income. I'd love to see more missions in which I can get OP as a reward for a job well done but less passive income. And I also thought that Cleaners got eliminated too early, it's a waste. Suggestion: Maybe more Cleaners missions in Phases 1,2,3 with more OP rewards.
14. Supporters, like weapons, are not equal, most notably the security and intelligence ones. Intelligence supporter provides valuable OP daily. And security supporter reduces panic by 1 globally +1 in a region once a month! My game lasted for 11 months, so it was ~20% panic reduction in a region over the course of the whole game, basically just 1 terror mission. It is so insignificant. Suggestion: add a passive regional bonus to security supporter which allows the first soldier to die in a mission instead survive with critical wounds. Can't say much about money, science and manufacturing supporters - they exist.
15. Way too few resources in the early game and way too many in the late game. I got the feeling that after the first alien base I was swimming in Alenium and alloys (big UFOs also helped), had enough cash to actually build bases, manufacture everything I want and didn’t feel the need to make compromises in spending resources. Also, would love to see base presets (like soldier load-outs) when constructing them. Something like a make base with 1 radar + 2 hangars + 2 queued fighters (assuming the workshop on other base is free) which are being constructed at the same time as the base is being built and then delivered when hangars finish for a total of *insert sum* cash and resources. Also, maybe lower the price of building a base but increase the price of maintaining it because it is too expensive to get another base up and running in the early- and mid-game when you have many other things to research and manufacture.
16. Air battles are fine but I can’t shake the feeling that something is missing. Maybe add pilot behaviors? “Maintain distance”, “close-up dogfight”, etc. Right now it’s just fly to the point and shoot. Micromanagement is possible but it’s not exciting: pause-resume-pause-resume. Also, the difficult fights are in the mid-game. Late-game is too easy, cruisers and battleships are just bullet sponges that don’t pose a threat. They need more escorts.
17. The Gemini fighter is a huge power spike compared to Phantom. Two Geminis can destroy any UFO group with no hull damage easily. Angels and Phantoms are very similar. Phantoms need a little buff I think, maybe to their evasion roll cooldown and speed or maybe some kind of new ability.
18. Air modules are too simple. I have never used fuel module because never had problems with range (the limiting factor is radar range rather than fuel). In comparison, armor module is a must. It’s not even a choice. Would love to see more modules (single use super afterburners and IR countermeasures for example).
Very minor point - laser air canon shot has a travel time. Really? Laser? While technically it does have a travel time but it’s a laser, it travels at the speed of light. At these distances it should be instant hit when fired. It can be a laser specialty – instant hits but weather conditions (add them?) can reduce efficiency.
On a bigger scale, weapon specialties can be a major thing. I would love to see weapon types as side grades rather than plain upgrades. Ground lasers had that unique thing – recharging ammo and less recoil. Too bad all other weapon types lack uniqueness and are pure upgrades. Gauss weapons can have increased range and unlimited ammo because they shoot little metal specks with a downside of fewer shots (more TUs to fire or fewer shots in a volley). Fusion weapons on the other hand have less range but are devastating at close ranges while losing efficiency the longer it travels (plasma dissipates while travelling).
Why do I think that side grades are better? If you encounter a UFO with let’s say 100 HP and your basic canon deals 5 damage it takes 20 shots to shoot it down. An upgraded canon now deals 10 damage but with scaling UFOs now have 200 HP, so it’s the same 20 shots. Basically, nothing has changed, the gameplay is the same. Side grades on the other hand have their upsides and downsides and provide choices that player has to make. The game changes based on what players decide to do. Players can screw up with what weapon type they choose and they will have to own this mistake.
But this wall of text doesn’t mean that everything is bad, I had a lot of funny, cool and simply memorable moments. One of which was an extremely fantastic play by the AI when it baited my planes with 3 UFO groups back-to-back without time to rearm and repair. When all planes were out of ammo and barely alive the AI launched an assault on my base. I just had to watch UFO fly towards my base with realization that I can’t do anything about it. Great job!
Overall, the game definitely left an impression on me and that is a good thing, that is what all games should try to achieve. I believe Xenonaughts 2 to be a solid foundation to be built upon and really look forward to what may come of it.
Thanks for the long post, it's always useful to read someone's detailed impressions on the game. I'm also happy to read that our updates have changed a negative review to a positive one; we've put a lot of work into the game in Early Access and it's great to hear that it has improved the player experience for you.
I'll pick out a few specific points to reply to, but I think my main comment is that it sounds like you're playing the game on too hard a difficulty setting. If you're a big classic X-Com fan then really you should start on Veteran and only play on Commander if you want an insane challenge - it's for people that already know the game inside out, and if you jump straight in at that difficulty level then you'll regularly have "this feel like bullshit" moments and it's just a recipe for frustration rather than fun.
Specific points:
1) The damage randomisation is 50-150% of the weapon base damage, and then armour reduction is applied. So the effect of damage randomisation is magnified against units with armour, but that's a gameplay mechanic you need to engage with - you can always strip armour from enemies using explosives if you want to make damage more reliable, or use weapon types with higher armour penetration.
2+7) In general we want to go for a feeling of nobody ever being safe, where there's a chance even your best soldier in their best armour can be one-shotted by a lucky enemy hit from a tier-equivalent enemy weapon (this is taken straight from classic X-Com). The game loses a lot of tension if you know that your soldier is definitely able to take at least one hit; it's like knowing they have an extra life. However, the actual problem here sounds like you're perhaps getting the armour a bit too late - if anything, armour can be too powerful if you unlock it early because it turns your soldiers into tanks who can take 3-4 hits each until the enemy weapons catch up. Guardian armour in particular can be unlocked off the Destroyer UFO and is very strong if you get it early. Ironically the Colossus is currently considered by far the worst armour in the game by most players.
4) I agree, we'll hopefully give the aliens a bit more individual personality with some AI adjustments in the next major update.
5) Yes, the AI currently cheats in this regard. We're planning to fix that in the next major update.
9) For new recruits, the North America region bonus is a huge bonus to their stats (+5 in each) and if you've built Training Centers, the training rate increases with the number of alien species captured and interrogated. This won't allow you to replace a whole squad overnight but if you're losing 2-3 soldiers a mission it should allow you to constantly be filling gaps in your team without losing too much effectiveness.
11) It's important to understand how overwatch actually works - it's explained in the tooltips, but a unit will only reaction fire when they have higher Initiative than their target (which is Reflexes x % of TU remaining). If you've got a wall of soldiers who are all at low TU, they won't overwatch fire until the alien drops below a certain level of TU, but if they're on full TU then they'll overwatch fire much earlier. But the same things applies to the aliens, and knowing how the system works can make assaulting UFOs easier. It's not always a good idea when breaching a UFO to spend all the TUs of your first soldier through the door, because it basically guarantees that every alien in the room will get to overwatch fire at them, etc. The system is pretty good when you understand it, but I'll admit that it's not well explained at the moment. But it's little things like this that suggest you should probably play on Veteran rather than Commander.
14) Yeah, the panic Supporters might need a slight buff. It's effectively -7 Panic per month per supporter though, so -77 Panic over an 11 month campaign, and it sounds a bit better when written out that way. Probably still the weakest ones overall though.
In general, the late game has worse balance than the early game, and I think many of your later points show this. I'll be doing some more full campaign playthroughs as part of our next update so hopefully this will improve. In terms of new content, we're getting close to release now but some of the more interesting stuff (like weapon variety etc) are things we'd like to look at as post-launch content.
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This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
Gameplay Changes:
- Operation Points can now fall below zero and turn negative if you pay the UFO Delegation cost while not having enough OP available to cover it.
- Temporarily removed the air combat ambience track, as some people were complaining it contains a painful high-pitched whine that makes the air combat almost unplayable. Sadly I'm in my late thirties and I apparently lack the auditory range to be able to hear this (ouch), but we'll add the sound back in once our sound engineer has had a chance to strip out the offending whine.
- Added a tooltip for the UFO Delegation campaign option that explains what the system does.
- Removed the obsolete "Evasive Roll: Enabled / Disabled" tooltip line from the various air combat weapons.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed an issue where you could see round a wall in the Battleship UFO.
- Fixed the Sentinel Module tooltip not displaying the correct vision angle increase.
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This update contains the first round of stability fixes for Milestone 6. Please continue to report any issues that you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them!
These hotfixes can sometimes break tactical mission saves, so if you experience unexpected crashes playing an existing tactical save immediately after the update please try restarting the mission by loading the pre-mission strategy save.
Gameplay Changes:
- We've added a fallback trigger for the "endless war" system. This spawns endless waves of Battleships so people can continue to play the strategy layer for as long as they want, but in some cases it was not triggering correctly. We think we've fixed that bug, but it's a serious enough issue we've set up a fallback trigger that activates "endless war" at day 500 if it wasn't already active.
- As it's now possible to capture an Eternal without first completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission, completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission is now required to unlock the Operation Endgame research project.
- We've made some optimisations to the AI turn, which should mean processing civilian actions should be faster.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed an AI hang that could occur on the alien turn.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to close an open door that was touching an interactive object like a Cleaner data desk.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you unassigned the target rescue soldiers from the dropship on the Rescue Soldiers mission using the assignment dropdown, which previous fixes had not dealt with.
- Fixed the tactical map randomisation being broken (it had started marking the wrong map as "played" after a tactical mission).
- Hopefully fixed the issue where the post-Phase 4 event sequence that is supposed to eventually unlock endless waves of Battleships can get broken.
- Fixed the bug where certain Project Available pop-ups that were not triggered by completing a research project (e.g. Corpse Analysis, MARS Rebuild, etc) would show a pop-up taking you to the research screen even though they only contained engineering projects.
- Fixed a rounding issue that could cause the player to be unable to recruit a Geoscape Supporter despite seemingly having exactly the right amount of Operations Points to do so.
- Fixed some z-fighting with the Pegasus dropship interior walls.
- Hopefully fixed the issue where the shot crosshair would sometimes become offset when hovering over enemy Sentry Guns.
- Removed Lock Time from various aircraft weapon tooltips, as it's not used in most cases and would show error text in the other cases.
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Hello everyone - we're now into December, so it's time to wish you all a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year before filling you in on our progress during November. As I'm unlikely to write a separate development update for December due to the way the holidays fall (I'm not back in the office until 5th January), I'll also give an update on our plans for the 2-3 weeks before we shut down for the festive season.
Milestone 6 Released:
The big news in the last month is we finally managed to release Milestone 6 onto our public branches. We're glad this update is finally in the hands of the players after it spent a solid couple of months stuck in the final bugfixing phase - but the overall reaction to the launch has been positive, and people seem to be enjoying the new content and improvements.The launch also went relatively smoothly in stability terms, and we've not been fighting too many fires post-launch. Quite a few bug reports have come in for relatively minor gameplay issues and we've been steadily working through them, but most of the fixes for these are being rolled into Milestone 7.
Performance Improvements:
Although the various fixes for Milestone 6 have absorbed a fair bit of programmer time, we did also start working on performance improvements for Milestone 7. We asked the community what parts of the game they felt needed the most optimisation, and we're currently working to this list:- Speeding up load times
- Reducing slowdown when alien UFOs spawn on the Geoscape
- Duration of the AI turn in tactical combat
- Explosions in the tactical combat causing framedrops
However we didn't have too many replies on this particular topic, so if you're reading this and feel there are other areas of the game where the performance needs improving then please do let us know (remember that this should be based on playing standard builds of the game, as Experimental builds have much worse performance due to all their additional logging).
We've already made some improvements to the tactical mission load times and the AI turn duration, and we'll be continuing with these during December. The goal here is to get these completely finished before we start public testing of Milestone 7, because these are the changes most likely to cause gameplay bugs!
New Content:
We continued to work on the new content for Milestone 7 over the past month. The strategy UI background art progression system is now fully functional (it had some teething problems when we tested it last month) and the artwork has been added to the game for the research and engineering screens, and we're now halfway through the base stores screen.The programming work to implement the aircraft paperdoll system (where the plane artwork updates as you change weapons and equip items) was also completed last month, and we finished the artwork for the Angel interceptor and all of the weapons. Work on the Phantom is now well advanced and we expect to have moved onto the Gemini by the end of December.
We've also been working on various smaller content tasks, such as adding an additional tier of extra-tough Psyon / Sebillian / Wraith soldiers that accompany Eternals and appear on the hardest missions. These new aliens have claimed the "praetorian" rank, so we've added a new alien "warrior" rank and demoted the former elite / praetorian aliens down a level (the rank sequence now goes soldier / warrior / elite / praetorian). The game files for this have now been completed, and we'll be adding the 3d models for these new units after Christmas.
We're also adding a new interrogation project for the Cleaner Leaders, as a few people have pointed out that it was weird that they didn't have one when the other types of Cleaner do. Again, the game files for this have been completed and we're hoping to get the research art and research text completed by the end of December.
Conclusion:
I think that's everything I wanted to cover. The only releases we have planned for the remainder of the month are our ongoing hotfixes for Milestone 6, with Milestone 7 not arriving on the Experimental branch until January - so I hope everyone has a good festive season and we'll see you all next year!-
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On 11/29/2025 at 12:07 PM, st3fan21 said:
I just saw that the ranges for all aircraft in Xenonauts 2 are wrongly stated.
If you just compare them to the radar maximum range with 3 Quantum Arrays then you can see this clearly.
The ranges of the aircraft should be much bigger, because they clearly can go much further than radar range and come back so at least double the max radar range (8700 km x 2 = 17400 km)
In the first Xenonauts the first dropship had a range of 52800 km and it probably should be the same here but it is just stated wrong in the xenopedia entry.
If the phantom really had only 5250 km range it should not be able to reach a base max radar range, but it can go all the way to other continents so...
Yeah, you're right. These numbers are totally broken. We'll get that fixed in Milestone 7.
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On 11/29/2025 at 9:40 AM, Gevudan said:
Still like before it just seems a bad roll, if there's even 1% chance of a hit, I do expect a hit sometimes. But it does happen a bit more often than I like, but that could just be bad luck.
So the shot hitting isn't actually a bug - the enemies have a 10%-15% hit chance when shooting into that smoke, so it's not completely ridiculous that they could score a hit on a unit moving in the smoke. It's just fairly unlikely.
However the one thing this has exposed is that the AI is using different thresholds for shooting at units during overwatch fire than for normal shots. It won't normally take a shot unless it has at least a 30% chance of hitting, but it'll overwatch fire at a 5% hit chance. So I think we need to unify those and make the aliens less likely to overwatch - as they will occasionally roll highly and score a lucky hit.
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On 11/29/2025 at 2:40 PM, gG-Unknown said:
it says:
You need enough empty slots in your drop-ship to recover ...
In fact you dont need any empty slots, because soldiers was elevated into "on mission" status.
and
is not possible to left soldiers behind bscouse of missing slots.
Players can remove those soldiers from the dropship, so you can still get in a position where you have too many soldiers and the rescued ones get left behind. But we'll reword the message.
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On 11/28/2025 at 6:59 PM, st3fan21 said:
I have noticed that the OP cost only affects your positive OP balance.
So if i have 100 OP and the cost of doing a mission is 150, after the mission i have 0.
This can be manipulated so you could use as many OP as you can, then have only a small amount and then do the mission and you lose very little OP.
I think the balance for OP should be able to go below 0, only if you do a mission and the cost of said mission is above your current OP. (so you can t use this negative op balance to buy supporters)And if you have a negative OP balance maybe you should not be able to start a new mission that would cost OP.
Maybe this is a feature? not a bug?
Thanks. Yeah, doing extra crash site missions should be taking this value negative. We'll get this fixed.
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On 11/29/2025 at 9:24 AM, Gevudan said:
Hello, a developer suggested I upload a save and video of cleaner units shooting through smoke as apparently that's not intended, I thought it was just a bad roll. I managed to recreate the issue, except with reaction fire. I assume that cleaner units should not be able to fire through smoke and intervening objects to hit too often.
auto_groundcombat_turn_4_start-7.json user_day_1_atlas_base_manual_save-1.json
Thanks. We'll take a look. I think there's a minimum accuracy threshold for the AI units to take a reaction fire shot, so I think something might be going wrong here. That much smoke should be making it impossible.
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This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
This update contains our first round of stability fixes for Milestone 6. I'm going to release them on this branch now so they get a few days of testing over the weekend while we wait to see if the wider playerbase encounter any stability bugs in Milestone 6.
Gameplay Changes:
- We've added a fallback trigger for the "endless war" system. This spawns endless waves of Battleships so people can continue to play the strategy layer for as long as they want, but in some cases it was not triggering correctly. We think we've fixed this bug, but it's a serious enough issue we've set up a fallback trigger that activates "endless war" at day 500.
- As it's now possible to capture an Eternal without first completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission, completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission is now required to unlock the Operation Endgame research project.
- We've made some optimisations to the AI turn, which should mean processing civilian actions should be faster.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed an AI hang that could occur on the alien turn.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to close an open door that was touching an interactive object like a Cleaner data desk.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you unassigned the target rescue soldiers from the dropship on the Rescue Soldiers mission using the assignment dropdown, which previous fixes had not dealt with.
- Fixed the tactical map randomisation being broken (it had started marking the wrong map as "played" after a tactical mission).
- Hopefully fixed the issue where the post-Phase 4 event sequence that is supposed to eventually unlock endless waves of Battleships can get broken.
- Fixed the bug where certain Project Available pop-ups that were not triggered by completing a research project (e.g. Corpse Analysis, MARS Rebuild, etc) would show a pop-up taking you to the research screen even though they only contained engineering projects.
- Fixed a rounding issue that could cause the player to be unable to recruit a Geoscape Supporter despite seemingly having exactly the right amount of Operations Points to do so.
- Fixed some z-fighting with the Pegasus dropship interior walls.
- Hopefully fixed the issue where the shot crosshair would sometimes become offset when hovering over enemy Sentry Guns.
- Removed Lock Time from various aircraft weapon tooltips, as it's not used in most cases and would show error text in the other cases.
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On 11/26/2025 at 11:19 PM, Nodrak said:
I tried 100.0 setting, it stopped any tests vs aliens. That was the main reason I didn't use it. I can try 100.0 vs soldiers, but I think my next batch will be on 0.0 based on recent findings.
I already ruled this out. The 'Missed Shot Hit % is rolled using the actual Shot Hit %', which I believe is a custom function over riding the math? So then I tried killing the front soldier and missing that way, which led to the discovery of 'Accurate Misses'. The current line of thought is that, all my 'Testing' is on the map edge for room (with almost no colliders behind the targets, even in the 51 tile shots), and this is the actual cause. You have to miss and hit a non-target behind the target. This is all aligning very reasonable with my experiences so far. There are some times where I was sure I was going to lose several soldiers to burst fire, but they all missed.
This, ironically, would make the shield very strong, as aliens will artificially miss it unless it is off by itself.
I was also wondering if the Burst Fire Overkill is related to 'delta t' / tickrate. I have a fairly powerful computer running at high refresh rates usually. I might try forcing 60fps or something later as well.
Yeah, I'd try the 100 setting and test with soldiers. I don't think there's any advantage to testing with aliens really - you can position soldiers wherever you'd like.
What do you mean "The 'Missed Shot Hit % is rolled using the actual Shot Hit %', which I believe is a custom function over riding the math?" - at what point is it using the shot hit %? When the "miss" bullet passes through the tile of the target unit?
So if there's a 35% hit chance shot and it missed, you'll have a 35% chance of hitting the intended target if the bullet goes through their tile? And you'd also have a 35% chance of hitting any unit stood behind the target if the shot passes through their tile?
On 11/27/2025 at 1:45 AM, Nodrak said:Another example came up in normal play, I opened a door and saw a cyber-drone. All 3 Marines took a 35%+ shot at it (expected 3.5 hits), and all 3 marines hit the shield at the door, killing him:
Shot 1: The tile next to the doorway took a hit alien took 2 hits, cover in-front of it took 1+, wall behind took 2+
Second shot: Essentially the same result, less hits on enemy than expected (3 expected min), my solder ducked the wall eats another shot (25% normal setting):
These shots in testing vs no nearby colliders were laserbeams, but here my solder gets hit again! (2/10 of the bullets aimed at this soldier in just the picture below) (25% chance?)
These are almost 80 accuracy soldiers, with range bonus, one was crouched. The first shot was a laser machine-gun, other 2 were Gauss.
I have seen too many of these for it to be 'chance' (poor aliens):
6-7 soldiers in the burst fire, and I can't see any tiles hit anywhere or soldiers
The actual laser beams we saw in testing, happen still:
So the first example there where the three soldiers all killed the shield guy seems a good time to attach a save game, as it seems like it's at the start of the turn? I should be able to get exactly the same results as you if we don't reset the seed.
But even then just looking at the stats it doesn't seem that ridiculous. You're firing 30 shots and you'd expect 20 of them to miss, and that guy is only slightly away from the firing line and there's no cover before him to absorb any of the shots coming his way. Even accounting for the 25% stopping chance of that soldier, you don't need to get too unlucky with the rolls for that to be a plausible outcome (especially if you've rolled badly on the hit roll so there's more miss shots flying around).
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On 11/26/2025 at 5:10 PM, Herb said:
i reported this bug at the beginning of Milestone 5 but apparently no-one else has run into it. the game can't be won because no aliens show up and do anything. i've gone 4 funding cycles straight without anything happening except Xenonaut organization funding reports. apparently if i don't capture any of the Eternals when the battleship or alien base missions first appear they never appear again and the game is pretty much pointless after that. some version of this has happened since the first public milestone came out for early backers. get to a certain point in the game and nothing happens after that except funding reports.
Herb...
Thanks. We've looked at this bug several times and we thought it was fixed, so it's a bit disappointing to discover it's still broken for at least some people. It looks like the timeline that is meant to culminate in enabling the Endless War system failed halfway through for some reason - we'll take a look and try and figure out why.
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On 11/26/2025 at 2:45 PM, st3fan21 said:
but if you save the game after the psion falls and then load the game, then it looks as it should, on the ground uncoscious
Thanks. I can reproduce this at my end, so don't worry about grabbing any extra files - we've got everything we need!
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On 11/25/2025 at 12:45 PM, Skitso said:
Not sure if I understood you correctly, but my soldier rescue was a desert map. (not polar). At least in earlier versions each cleaner mission had map pool ranging all different biomes. (Excluding intel gather and VIP assassination)
Same with terror missions. There were at least 3 different variations (for the first weastern town terror), but now I've had the same map every time.
Cleaner HQ has 2 different maps (as far as I know) and I've had the same map at least 3 times in a row on my last playthroughs.
Thanks. There is a randomisation system but it turns out something has got pretty fundamentally broken in it, so we'll fix that up shortly.
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On 11/21/2025 at 9:24 PM, Rooney said:
I have 4 generators in a block which is +2 adjacency per generator but only getting +60 not +80. Adjacency note says bonus is per adjacency so its only calculating 1 adjacency not 2. I should be getting +80
Do you have a screenshot or a saved game I can look at? You're right that a 2x2 block should generate 80 extra power.
15 hours ago, Nodrak said:Its more of a discrepancy between the wording semantics and the math. The 'Adjacency Bonus' is the "+" symbol, so each bonus is shared between 2 generators (and all other buildings work like this). A 2x2 square gets 4 bonuses, not 8.
I think the user is already expecting to have a total of 4 bonuses. He's just saying there's two links per building, and he's expecting 80 power in total (which is 20x4).
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9 hours ago, Nodrak said:
I took these shots about 40-100+ times i think so far? (400-1000 rolls) At 100% it wont let me take the shot due to the 'AntiHack/0% system', so I use 99. I will try 99.99.
I think 100% intervening unit chance should work fine. You don't need any intervening units for the shot, or cover. You just need a low-accuracy shot, ideally at relatively short range, and a completely clear shot path. Your theory seems to be:
- The game does the normal hit roll (which in this case would be at less than 5% hit chance, so this will usually fail)
- If it misses, the shot then has a second chance of hitting the target if it passes through their tile. If you set the intervening unit chance to 100%, then this means the target will *always* be hit if the miss shot passes through their tile (assuming what you believe is true). This should happen a lot with a low-accuracy short-range shot. You could even switch back to the Experimental Legacy branches which are from quite some time before my deviation changes; you'd expect almost every miss shot to hit with the previous very low deviation angles.
So 2-3 tiles of smoke and a low accuracy shot mode should make that very easy to test. There's no point complicating things with intervening cover or intervening units. I predict you'll get a number of hits over a large number of shots that's quite close to the hit chance on the cursor. If you're right you'll get way more.
BTW if you go to the game directory and run the game using RunWithCheat.bat you can press T to refill the unit's Time Units, and Shift+R to reload their weapon. It's easy to test large numbers of shots that way.
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22 minutes ago, Nodrak said:
29+56+45+12+49+15+57 = 263 damage on 1 soldier, through armor.
Yes. I was having issues with getting screenshots because of the keybindings, so I rebound it. This is the sniper, he hits 100% pretty much everywhere in the green and orange ranges.
So any misses in those 100% zones, will be Accurate Misses due to cover (or smoke, covered in other posts). I forgot I turned the setting back to 25%, so this will be 'real numbers'.
At (99% StoppingChance) the shot would hit the cloaked sniper easier than shooting him directly (Ctrl Click accuracy hack). Ergo anytime shooting someone is harder than 25%, shooting behind them is a hack (I think we both know this?). The hack is possible because of the 2 rolls, and the bugs.
Thanks. I guess I must be wrong about the damage stacking in bursts then.
Regarding the hack which we both know about:
- The actual "hit chance" of hackily shooting the tile behind the target is 25% when you can be certain the miss shot will pass through the target's tile. But all miss shots deviate, and the deviation was recently increased. So the average hit chance of the hack is quite a bit lower than 25%. At long range it'll be a lot lower. If you're at short range (maybe because there's smoke reducing accuracy to 0%) then the hack is much more effective, but it's still less than 25% even in that case.
- I'm still not sure why you think this proves there are two rolls? There's just one roll. Changing the aim target just changes what target entity is set to 0% stopping chance and cannot be hit by the miss bullets.
I'm not sure you need the ability to shoot at 0% shots to test this stuff? Surely you can just engineer a shot where you have a hit chance of less than 5% (ideally 1%) and set the intervening unit stopping chance to be 100, and then just shoot a large number of shots at them?
There'll obviously be some variance due to randomness but if I'm correct, you'll end up with roughly the number of hits shown in the cursor hit chance (because only the "hits" will actually hit the target). If you're correct then you'll end up with WAY more than that, as almost every shot will miss and any missed shot that passes through the target's tile would have a 100% chance of hitting them.
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3 hours ago, Nodrak said:
Essentially, it has to or my evolved play-style would be different. I am having difficulties generating a test case that proves this conclusively and not just via statistics, but it seemed like the Deviation chance in 6.24.0 had made this even harder. Then it occurred to me that I have been using soldiers as stand-ins for 'cover/obstacles' every time I was trying to test this (other than smoke). I will have to setup a new test situation to confirm this, but in the meantime these are examples of 'Accurate Misses' with the sniper rifle taking 100% shots against a target behind 99% 'cover'.
I'll look this over properly tomorrow. Just two quick things to mention in reply here:
- Yeah, with burst fire I don't think units are capable of taking more damage than their HP permits. This allows you to gun down multiple enemies stood in a line with a single burst, rather than the first unit absorbing all the shots. But it does mean you won't get an accurate feel for the number of expected hits from a short-range burst, as there's a cap on the max hits based on HP.
- What do you mean when you say "these are examples of 'Accurate Misses' with the sniper rifle taking 100% shots against a target behind 99% 'cover'? It'd be great if you could provide a screenshot of the full shot path and the cursor hit chance. I assume this is the two save files listed under "sniper shot tests"?
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42 minutes ago, SoftwareSimian said:
I think the interface should be presented slightly differently.
1) Instead of a "-100 OP Victory Effect", I think the 100 OP cost should be on the "Launch Combat Team" line, makes it more clear there's a cost to launch this operation and not that doing this mission has a counterintuitive negative-reward.
2) In the screenshot, I don't have 100 OP available, the Launch Combat Team button should be grayed out (and would be clear why with my above suggestion to put the cost on the button).
See attached screenshot of actual and crude mockup of suggestion.
Yes, we considered this too. But launching the combat team doesn't necessarily mean the dropship arrives at the mission site, or that the player decides to start the mission. So it's tricky to tie anything into the launch combat team button here.
[v4.4.1] Nationality flags - Canada
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
Sure. I'm happy to update the image if you make a more correct one for me. However it does need to stick to the aspect ratio / dimensions of the existing flag image because it's a UI image and we expect it to be a certain size. So you'll need to bodge it a bit if necessary.
Here's the existing file:
If you make an updated file then please DM it to me to ensure I don't miss it.