Chris
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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 Updates:
- The Colossus Armour and Exosuit armour have been swapped around in the tech tree, and their stats and construction cost have been updated accordingly. There is now also an upgrade project for the Colossus unlocked from the Harvester UFO which allows you to improve their armour, which keeps them semi-relevant into the endgame (although the Exosuit is much better general-purpose armour).
- We've moved the Global Panic caused by a UFO finishing it's mission successfully onto the anomalies, which means that UFOs gradually inflict Global Panic as they fly around generating anomalies rather than it all happening at once at the end of the mission.
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Made several changes to the way Cleaner reinforcements work on the Data Raid / Eliminate VIP missions to discourage people spawn camping the reinforcements:
- Enemy reinforcements now spawn with 50% Time Units, instead of zero Time Units.
- Cleaner reinforcements now escalate more quickly, with subsequent waves of reinforcements coming 3 turns after the first reinforcements and having twice as many enemies.
- Mission briefings should now specify accurate values for what turn the reinforcements arrive, and the "enemy reinforcements have arrived" dialogue conversations should now trigger on the correct turns.
- The first Destroyer to spawn on the Geoscape now always contains Sebillians.
- Returned the interceptor power generation values to what they were in Milestone 3 (10 for Angel, 13 for Phantom, 15 for Gemini).
- ARES now has 100 HP rather than 1200 HP, as I made a typo in the last build.
- When in grenade / medikit targeting mode, the game will no longer preview the portrait / stats of other soldiers when you hover over their minitabs at the top of the screen (because doing this cancelled the grenade / medikit use).
- Updated the art on the Fusion Charge so it glows fusion green rather than plasma blue.
- Slight damage increase (~10%) on the Combat Knife and Energy Knife.
- Panic reduction for winning a Terror Site reduced to -10 local Panic from -20 local Panic.
- Alien Psi-Amp is now marked as Junk on the stores screen.
- Briefcase of Money item now has an image, and is a 4x3 inventory item that weighs 10.
- Added some new sounds for construction of a base on the Geoscape, and for demolishing base structures.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a crash that could occur when you tried to throw a grenade with a Colossus soldier.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you destroyed a shipping container with a unit on top of it.
- Fixed selling a dropship causing the player to lose all items equipped on soldiers assigned to that dropship.
- Fixed an issue with the Laser: Recharge project not correctly upgrading the ammo in the planned loadouts of Unassigned soldiers.
- Fixed the "Eternal Interrogation" research project unlocking after you completed the Alien Leader interrogation, even if you had not captured an Eternal.
- Fixed soldiers that already died of bleeding wounds continuing to take damage and trigger info toasts at the start of each round.
- Fixed players being unable to save loadout changes if all they changed was toggling the Heavy Armour toggle on / off.
- Fixed the Shielded Plating aircraft armour item incorrectly using the Alloy Plating item art.
- Fixed abduction tubes continuing to play their humming sound even if they had teleported away due to the mission timer expiring.
- Fixed freed civilians on Abduction missions not being counted in the post-mission Debrief line about surviving civilians.
- Fixed some broken floor tiles on the ATLAS Base 3 map.
- Fixed the Harvester UFO hull dropshadow darkness being inconsistent between the landed and crashed variants.
- Fixed there being no sound played when you demolished a building that was under construction.
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15 hours ago, SoftwareSimian said:
I unlocked the two upgrades (from Alien Plasma research) around turn 156. I have savegames from 154 (Alien Plasma research in progress, neither project done of course), and 158 (Recharge upgrade done, Damage upgrade not done). Hope that helps.
Nothing unusual happened that I remember. All the laser weapons were built before the upgrades. Possibly some of the equipped (or virtually-equipped) laser ammo somehow is missing the upgrade?
user_day_154_manual_save-61.json user_day_158_manual_save-63.json
Thanks. Yeah, we've been able to reproduce it now - we'll get it fixed shortly.
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Great, makes sense. I'll assume this bug is fixed then.
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12 hours ago, Emily_F said:
@Chris I have 4 so far:
- I swear the chance-to-hit with any of the stun weapons is WAY lower than it claims in-game.
- I'm convinced the training facility isn't working
- The rescue mission reward of three crap soldiers isn't worth it.
- The ambush mission is a turkey-shoot.
Thanks. I've checked 1) in the game and it seems to work fine, but if you have a situation where it's wrong then do a bug report and I'll check the saves to see what the random rolls are and what the target number is. Similarly, with the training facility, send me a save and I'll take a look. It might just give very slow stat increases because we slowed it all down in Milestone 3.
The rescue missions now also give $50k per rescued soldier, as they're each carrying a Briefcase of Money.
We'll be taking another look at the Ambush missions some time this week.
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On 6/2/2024 at 11:18 AM, Skitso said:
Random things in order of occurrence:
- Is there a way to check the passive alien damage buffs I've unlocked?
- Accelerated weapons article is not found in the Xenopedia
- At day 79, I've made maybe 13 warden armours, 10 accelerated weapons, upgraded accelerated aircraft weapons and alenium generator. And I still have almost 70 alloys left. It's WAY too much. Early UFO's should reward considerably less alloys.
- I've not seen a single sebillian up until day 100
- Took the Cleaner HQ with full warden/accelerated team accompanies with a MARS and it felt a tad underwhelming. The new map was a welcomed surprise, but it felt like there was too few enemies to make it feel like an epic battle against tough enemy main base. End room was fine, maybe 1 more enemy there, but rest of the facility needed maybe 3 or 4 more.
Having tested this on my own Veteran playthrough, I actually think you'll be fairly short of Alloys if you start the game by building a second Laboratory and go up to 12 scientists at the start of month 2. You'll probably have unlocked Lasers before Destroyers start appearing, and as soon as you shoot down a Destroyer and research UFO Hull Plating you unlock a LOT of projects that require Alloys.
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4 minutes ago, SoftwareSimian said:
The "Sell Junk" button doesn't flag "Alien Psi-Amp" as junk to sell. Is there some future use for these, or is it just an oversight?
Also, I'll repeat what I posted in a previous thread (which was hijacked by people posting nonsense) about corpses that have already had both Engineering project done on them have no further in-game use and should also be considered "junk" to sell off.
Also, Androns get a pair of Engineering projects, and Sentry Gun Wreckage can be rebuit for some cost savings, but is there any use for Cyberdrone Wreckage or should that also be "junk"?
Yeah, Alien Psi-Amps should be junk. We do need to mark corpses as Junk once the linked engineering projects are completed, but that requires implementation of a system in code and we've not got round to it yet. But it's on the to-do list.
Cyberdrone Wreckage is currently junk, yeah. I should probably add engineering projects for that too.
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6 hours ago, Warie_W00kie said:
Will do, thanks for verifying!
Yeah, it's likely to be the damage roll on the weapons - the randomisation happens before the armour calculation, so if you roll 50% damage then an armoured enemy will probably take relatively little damage. Whereas if you roll 200% damage then you'll just vaporise them no matter how much armour they might have.
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On 6/2/2024 at 2:22 AM, SoftwareSimian said:
Right-click assigning an Unassigned soldier to the dropship tells me there are insufficient Laser Rifle Batteries to fill the loadout, even though those are available in unlimited quantities.
Thanks - so the issue here is due to the ammo for the lasers being upgraded. Do you remember when you ran the Laser upgrade that gives recharging ammo (and / or the damage upgrade project)?
Do you remember anything unusual that could have been happening when it occurred? Any reason why certain ammo might not have been upgraded successfully? It looks like some ammo has upgraded correctly and some has not. Were all the laser weapons built before or after the upgrade, or was it a mix of both?
If you've got earlier saves in the campaign that may also be helpful, perhaps.
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On 6/1/2024 at 8:23 PM, Emily_F said:
I've just built this phantom but the alloy armour (all armour in fact) has disappeared from the options.
13 hours ago, SoftwareSimian said:I think aircraft armor is not correctly set to "unlimited" (as it should be since you can no longer build it). I think maybe the game is allocating you a "free" one for each aircraft you build, since I just built my third Gemini and noticed I can equip one Gemini with more than one Armor, but then I don't have any available at all for the other one. Notice the "1" quantity in the upper-right of the armor box (this correctly adjusts quantity as you mount/dismount from aircraft). It should show "∞" for unlimited.
Did you start this campaign in 4.0.0, or is it a fresh one? I tried to fix this bug in 4.1.0 or 4.2.0 but I'm not sure if the fix will have applied to existing campaigns.
If I start a fresh campaign the armour does seem to be available for the Angel in unlimited quantities.
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On 6/1/2024 at 10:14 AM, Skitso said:
If I understood the rules correctly, any cover that is adjacent to the attacker should not be counted. Also, any cover with same or smaller cover value that is connected to the first cover should also not be counted. It's not the case:
There's one exception to the rule - the final piece of cover is not discounted if it's adjacent cover for the unit being targeted. Otherwise you end up in some strange situations with long lines of cover.
If the Mantid was stood one tile further back then both hay bales would be ignored.
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23 hours ago, Warie_W00kie said:
Thanks for this update guys! I had a lot of fun completing it. My thoughts on the playthrough (commander):
Visual / Audio Updates:
- Loved the new artwork and the retextures. I haven't noticed any major graphic issues.
- The sound update is welcomed and made the game feel mor polished. Not all the samples are created equal though. I really liked the weapon switch, melee misses, and the inventory management. The negative: Enemy shots hitting the shield only play sometimes and the volume is very low. Some of the menu sounds are a little too loud. Healing sounds like ducktape and sunscreen spray.
Balance Changes - Strategy:
1. Invasion tweaks
The invasion tweaks during early game felt tight and the pace is good. I think running the Cleaner missions and the UFO invasion together, instead of one phase into another is a good idea. It kept me on my toes and offered a good variety of missions.
I always felt the Cleaner storyline added to the gameplay, seeing it end so early on previous builds felt like the multifaceted missions and story ended abruptly and I'm left playing mid to late game with just shooting down UFO's. Even with the new addition of capturing alien officer and alien leader, the skeleton for mid to end game still look like it's missing something.
2. Funding
Regarding funding change, the rebalancing is going in the right direction. The added funds allow for smoother progression, instead of being broke all the time and then F4 until a new mission or UFO spawn. This last until around day 180.
I'm also glad to see funding linked to Panic again. Seeing panic go up and down more often throughout the month will add an element of tension that I think make things more interesting. That being said, the balance needs more tweaking as the difficulty was very easy even on commander. Every UFO spawn and cleaner mission can be completed while keeping up with upgrades and rotation of healthy soldiers. It was fairly easy to get panic to 0 and have it stay that way throughout the entire playthrough.
The exception is one real sweaty month (and surprisingly the same as previous builds) when the Abductors first show up. It was a mad tech climb that required all the funding as either the planes are too slow/weak to fight the UFO's or ground team need more recovery/replacement time due to weak gear. Deciding which country can take the panic hit so I can get the proper upgrades was the high point of the playthrough. Need more moments like these.
3. Air Combat
Significant changes were made this build. The return of unlimited guns and missiles sacrifice realism for gameplay, and I think it's a good move. In the last build, missiles cost way too much for the damage they do so the only way to win air encounters is to go twin guns for every UFO type.
With the updated payload and hardpoint system, having the right guns/missiles/torpedoes setup to combat different UFO matchups are starting to take form. Having different evasive roll cooldowns between planes/UFO is a great idea, maybe have it linked to the payload of the plane can take this idea further.
Having weapons that can shoot down missiles is also a good idea, but I didn't see it happen during this playthrough, am I missing something?
There is an exploit in air combat right now for torpedoes. Since they cost only 1 hardpoint, you can equip a pair of angels with total of 6 torpedoes and nuke the UFOs. The Fighter escorts are no threat since the torpedoes will destroy the main alien craft and escape before they get into shooting range. 3 Fighter air superiority can be dealt with by nullifying their rolls; start from their flank and firing torpedoes point blank (old Foxtrot trick in Xenonauts 1). This strategy will work until Gemini's are required.
Balance Changes - Tactical Combat:
1. Melee
Melee attacks can now miss! Stun rods from previous builds were pretty over-powered as they do the most stun and always hit. In early game, I must now decide if more of my soldiers will sacrifice the weight of 2 grenades (which can make or break an encounter) for stun rods. It now takes a conscious decision to get the damage bonuses/extra funding early game instead of it being a go-to strategy.
The energy blade is an interesting idea. Right now, the damage is too low for it be useful but maybe give it limited charges to cause suppression on mechanical units for high reflex (and bravery lol) soldiers to carry instead of sidearm or med kit.
2. Cleaner mission awards
There is now a $200k reason for me to risk my soldiers for VIP extraction.
$200k for VIP elimination was too much as it was a huge money maker already. The data sticks/Cleaner SMG are a given, but you also have more than enough turns to setup a stun on the VIP and spawn camp stun Cleaner Soldiers. Every soldier on the team can complete the mission with a stunned Cleaner in their backpack.
I have always had a dilemma with Cleaner missions and funding. I imagine one of the original intent for the Cleaner missions were to provide another way to make cash during early game. However, not only is the income great, provide mission variety in addition to UFOs and they also reduce Panic so there is really no reason to destroy their base until the Cleaner activities stop at day 180.
Final Thoughts:
The early game feels pretty solid. I think problems start to happen after the Cleaner arc ends, as the UFOs spawning rates are really low and abnormal missions (Terror/Abduction/Alien Base/Retaliation) didn't really have the impact it did in Xenonauts 1. The threat of losing a funding nation wasn't really there.
You guys make awesome games, keep it up!
Thanks. This is a very useful post.
I think I'm probably going to stop the Cleaner missions spawning as soon as the Cleaner Base is exposed, and then the player can just take out the base whenever they feel like it - but since destroying it awards both cash and a monthly funding increase, they'll be incentivised to do that immediately. I think that aligns incentives better than the current setup.
You're right that the mid-to-late game is still a bit lacking in variety. The plan is to add in some story elements to the end of the game in Milestone 5 that should hopefully tie everything together and give more of a purpose to the late game in the same way as the Cleaner arc gives the early game some purpose.
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Thanks for the detailed feedback, as ever. It's a useful read
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Thanks, glad you like the game so far. I think both the ground game and air game are improved in the experimental Milestone 4 builds too - there’s a few changes to the air combat, like aircraft equipment being upgraded rather than individually constructed and some general tweaks so its a bit less punishing in places.
The idea for pilots is something we’ve been debating a while. I like the idea in principle, but it’s a question of whether we have the time to do it - and also whether it overcomplicates the UI.
The idea about the different planes is a bit trickier. We’ve gone for a setup where most of the difference between planes has instead been moved onto the equipment itself, so planes can have more varied loadouts but there’s less room to differentiate different plane types.
The two things I’m considering at the moment are having the speed of aircraft be upgradable, so the Angel can keep up with the Phantom etc if you pay the Alenium for the upgrade, and to make whether a plane can evasive roll be based upon how much equipment it is carrying (eg it can only roll if it is carrying less than 80% of max capacity) which might give a bit more gameplay variety in loadouts (although obviously the numbers would need tweaking again).
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5 hours ago, vaBchRog said:
Upgraded Grenades to Fusion but the never showed up on my soldiers? Id this a known bug that I missed
This needs to be posted in the bug subforums - but yeah, if this is happening then it's a bug and please write up a bug report so we look into the circumstances. It seems to work fine to me based on some quick tests at my end. Maybe the dropship was airborne at the time of the upgrade?
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The in-game tooltips do explain all this if you hover over the stats in the tooltips, at least. But in summary:
1) Thermal has a damage bonus against terrain. Aliens take equal damage from each.
2) Destruction is applied after the damage calculation is performed, so it only affects future hits.
3) There’s damage randomisation of between 50-200% damage on it hit, which simulates hitting more or less vulnerable areas of the target.
Skitsos maths on the hit damage looks correct at first glance.
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12 minutes ago, Emily_F said:
So, the open/closed states are the wrong way round for that door...
Yeah, looks like the visual bug on the doors is back. Problem is this is really hard to reproduce at our end because it’s fine after loading a save, so do you happen to know what occurred previously?
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2 hours ago, Skitso said:
What about the mantis then? I've had them in a couple of UFO's with no backup units whatsoever..
EDIT: What I mean is that should wraiths be accompanied with sebillian? If so, it's not happening at the moment.
Scouts can contain just Mantids, or I think just Sectons. From destroyers onwards it’s either Psyons / Sectons, Sebillians / Mantids, or Wraith / Servitors. Plus the appropriate terror unit as the campaign goes on.
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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 Updates:
- Stunned aliens will no longer suffer damage from bleeding wounds (as it's not possible to heal their bleeding wounds).
- The new Heavy Mentarch, Heavy Servitor and Heavy Cyberdrone enemy variants that appear late in the campaign are now palette swapped to look more distinctive from the standard versions, and are also now tougher and equipped with stronger weapons.
- ARES now has 100HP instead of 80HP. This means it has the same base HP value as the MARS, but it has stronger armour which makes it tougher overall.
- Basic Androns are now green rather than blue, matching their autopsy artwork.
- Right-clicking on interactive parts of the UI will now trigger a click sound in the same way left-clicking does.
- Added some new Andron "jump down" animations, in case they spawn above ground level.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a crash that could occur after a Xenonaut was killed by overwatch fire.
- Fixed Reapers being unable to attack.
- Fixed the Colossus armour animation issues that were causing it to disappear into the floor when attempting to walk in some circumstances.
- Fixed grenades sometimes not inflicting any damage on terrain when they hit the middle of a large object (such as a clump of trees).
- Fixed being unable to transfer Sentry Guns to a base that doesn't have any Living Capacity (they should only require Storeroom Capacity).
- Fixed the "Passive Aircraft Regeneration Item" debug item appearing in the aircraft equipment lists if you sell an aircraft.
- Fixed the teleport animation being visually stretched.
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6 hours ago, Skitso said:
Not sure if this is intended behaviour. End mission report after Atlas base states I had 12/12 aliens killed even though I stunned the general. Units had 11 kill icons.
Yeah, that's intentional. Otherwise people think they missed an enemy on the map somewhere.
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2 hours ago, Nils said:
A few things I have noticed.
First of all I would really appreciate, that if a soldier is standing right next to an alien, the soldier should not be able to miss the shot. In my opinion it does not make sense, even with a snapshot of a rifle to have like a 60% miss chance if the alien stands next to you.
Second, the ARES Plattform (successor of MARS) has much lower health, even though it says, that because it does not have moving parts, the armor plating can be much thicker. At this point of the game, the aliens do a lot of damage, which is fine. But the ARES should not be weaker than MARS, in fact it should be stronger.
Third, in the tactical battle, I would really like to see the most 4 important stats of a soldier without going to his inventory. Accuracy, reflexes, health (already done) and time units (already done).
Ah, good point about the ARES having less health than the MARS - I'll fix it so they're the same for the next patch. The ARES always has +5 Armour compared to the same armour on the MARS so it will be tougher once I fix the ARES to also have 100HP.
I don't think I want to set the game up so that you have a 100% hit chance with any weapon at point-blank range; I don't think it'll make the game balance better. There's less room for soldier improvement and less room for making the weapons distinct from one another if we do that (e.g. why would you need shotguns if rifles can hit with all the shots from a 3-round burst?)
You can quickly see the soldier accuracy in the bottom right hit info panel as soon as you hover over an enemy (or hold Ctrl to force fire).
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15 hours ago, Adamantium said:
Thanks. Could you give a bit more detail about where in the game it happened, and what happened before the crash? Hopefully it's already been fixed in 4.2.0 but it's hard to know without a little description.
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14 hours ago, Adamantium said:
Thanks. Could you give a bit more detail about where in the game it happened, and what happened before the crash? Hopefully it's already been fixed in 4.2.0 but it's hard to know without a little description.
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15 hours ago, Adamantium said:
I'm pretty sure it was overwatch and then the shield got destroyed +suppressed. seen that only this time but saw another instance too where the shield got destroyed but it was still visible
can't reproduce it because I don't have the auto savefiles anymore. sorry
No problem. If you see it again, grab the save files and we'll hopefully be able to fix it. I'll keep an eye out for the bug myself too.
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9 hours ago, Ruggerman said:
I have checked my setting for camera and they are as instructed, the camera is enabled.
OK. And it's still happening in 4.2.0?
If so, do you have any touchscreen peripherals plugged in? Or does any of your PC use a touchscreen?
Xenonauts 2 May 2024 Update!
in Monthly Development Updates
Posted
May has been another month of progress for Xenonauts 2. We released the first experimental version of Milestone 4 a couple of weeks ago, an update which brings a lot of new improvements and features to the game. You can read the initial (very long) changelog here, but our work isn't complete yet - we'll be continuing to add new content and fix bugs until we feel the update is ready for general release on the standard Steam / GOG / Epic branches.
As always, we greatly appreciate the feedback from members of our community who have played the new version. This help has been invaluable in finding and fixing bugs, and ironing out problems with the game balance. We've got most of the stability issues under control now, which means it's a good time for anyone interested in playing the Experimental build to dive in - and please let us know any thoughts or issues with the game balance in the dedicated Milestone 4 Balance thread!
Campaign Balance & Stability:
Over the last month we spent a great deal of time playing the campaign in an attempt to get the game balance into reasonable shape before the Experimental release. This seems to have paid off, with the update getting a positive reaction from the community so far. There's not really space to go into specifics about what we've changed (we've tweaked the numbers in a LOT of different places), but the overall difficulty progression and campaign pacing should feel smoother than in previous versions.
We've also spent a lot of time fixing bugs. Most of the crash bugs in Milestone 4 have now been fixed, and we're continuing to work through fixes for the other bugs introduced by the new content. In addition to this, we've been working through our backlog of historical bugs (some of which date back to the original Early Access launch), and we've now fixed quite a few of the more serious historical issues too.
New Content:
We added new content in a few areas last month. Our new sound designer provided a number of new sounds for various parts of the game, such as the soldier equip screen where moving weapons and equipment in soldier inventories previously played no sound. There's now unique sounds for picking up and putting down all sorts of items (also played when switching weapons in the tactical combat), which makes the screen feel much more satisfying to use.
We've also added some new 3D models for certain alien variants, some of the human Fusion weapons, and some new terrain pieces for the Farm and Tropical biomes (although these won't appear in the game until Milestone 5). Our level designer has also continued to create new maps for the game; I think we're getting to a pretty good place in terms of map variety now.
As per usual, we've added a number of small usability features too - but there's too many of those to list, and individually they're not that exciting. Hopefully you'll notice one or two when you next play the game though!
Finally, there's a new bug reporting tool in Milestone 4 that makes it easier for players to report bugs, which can by accessed by pressing F11 and appears automatically after a crash. This just provides a handy zip file of all the files we need to track down bugs, which should make squashing the remaining bugs in the game more straightforward!
Conclusion:
Our priority for this month is to finish up Milestone 4 and push it out for general release - although we're exactly sure when this will happen, because a lot depends on what feedback we get from our testers and how many bugs we need to fix. However, we'll let everyone know as soon as we're able to set a launch date!