Chris

As I say, I've not had the final quotes through including the manuals, but a 9gb DVD with a printed cover, case and plastic wrap comes to £1.82 at the moment on a run of 100, and would be £1.72 if we got a run of 200. They're also extremely light and easy to post anywhere in the world - it'd only cost £2.50 to send it non-urgently anywhere in the world. I imagine the manuals would add maybe 50p to the cost, making it £4.82 if we did a run of 100. Even if we play it safe and round it up to £5 each, they would only be $8 each and it's something I can easily run from the UK, whereas the T-shirts / posters / art book are a little pricier if done over here. As well as more effort, likely. So that would be an extra $12 per pledge raised to $50, minus the $2 KS / Amazon would take from the extra $20 raise. So net gain, $10 each time ($20 if the person is only a Standard Pre-order originally, or outside the US and pays the extra for shipping). True, it's not a MASSIVE gain, but it's still enough to make it worthwhile, I think. I also think the $50 price point will have a lot more takers than $60, although I'm basing that on no real facts. I just think it'll have more chance of getting $20 / $30 people to pledge up to $50 than basically double their pledge. Plus the other advantage of a DVD copy is we don't have to do them until the game is done. We can use the cash for working capital in the meantime, as unless we really cock the launch up we'll at least make a couple of thousand dollars there that can be used for manufacturing the DVDs.

No. I don't know why we'd do that though - female soldiers are going in the game, so there's no more discrimination to deal with. Anyone can buy those portraits. The boxed copies would just be a short 20 page manual. We can't cater for old-school boxes, I don't think the demand would be there to offset the high production costs and the minimum print runs.

OK, so the vast majority of the donations to the game have been at the $20/$30 level. Though now the portraits are done, there's not been much in the way of donations above the $100 mark, I think most of those donations are outliers anyway and require quite a lot of extra goodies that wipe out a lot of the gain. I think the most effective way of increasing the donations is to add in a new $50 reward, and try to convince the $20/$30 crowd to up their pledges. A standard boxed copy is an option at the $50 price point. We're still waiting on the quotes including the printed manuals, but the price is likely to be in the $3-4 range per copy, plus postage. Selling them for $50 wouldn't be bad. They come in print ranges of 100 so even if we're left with an extra 99 at the end, I'm sure we'll be able to sell them on the forums or on the site or something eventually. We'll put this in as an option at the $50 reward tier if so, so you can choose one instead of a T-shirt. I think most people would be very happy with that, to be honest... The other alternative is a $50 digital tier. I'm thinking that this could include two premium pre-orders for the people that don't want to have a boxed copy, allowing them to give one to a friend. Both of these rewards (and everything higher) will also get a thankyou in the closing credits of the game. This is currently at the $500 reward tier, but we'll move it to the $50 reward tier. The $500 and $1000 reward tiers will instead get thankyous on the intro movie / screen. We'll close the $5,000 reward tier too - I didn't seriously expect anyone to buy it - and give the $1,000 guy 10 copies instead of $5. Finally, as I don't think we'll sell out of the $1,000 or $5,000 tiers, which between them have 20 portraits available, I think in the last three days we'll put up an additional 10 portraits at the $200 price point. These would just include a premium pre-order and your soldier / portrait in the game. Maybe a boxed copy too. That hopefully should get a bit more excitement going for the end the of the project. Sound good to people?

Done both, thanks for the suggestions.

Hehe can't argue with that. That's about the number of backers for the game. Coincidence?

Yeah, that's a basic andron. The higher ranks are bigger and different colours. They're not in the game yet, it's a bug I need to discuss with the programmer actually. They don't seem to be spawning in UFOs for some reason.

Ah. Can you report a bug that the Hunter is not showing ammo then please? It should be, and it used to.

Do you? You shouldn't. If you get cash for "selling" personnel then that's a bug and you should report it

Upvoted it

Yup, they're up now. I was hoping the tilesets wouldn't do so well because they're so much bloody work, but there we go.

As part of the celebrations for reaching our 100% funding on Kickstarter, we've announced a digital novella for all the Premium Preorderers and above (you'll recieve it if you Premium Preordered prior to Kickstarter too). This might be anything from 7,000/8,000 words up to 20,000 words. It might take a few months to arrive, but it'll arrive before the game does. It will tell the story of the Iceland Incident, humanity's first contact with extraterrestrials and the event that led to the foundation of the Xenonauts. It will tell the story of a Russian commander involved in the battle for the crashed UFO. It shouldn't be spoilerific - really it should just set some of the background for the game. It is to be written by Lee Stephen, who is the author of the Epic Universe series of books - they are currently the top selling independent sci-fi series in America. Writing is a very subjective thing, so but Lee has offered to write this for free - if you love what he writes, great! If you don't, fair enough - but it hasn't diverted any funds away from the game. So this can only be a good thing for us. Lee is a huge X-Com fan (hence why he's working for free), and I've pointed him at this thread. Please make him feel welcome and I'm sure he'll be happy to answer any questions you have. Alternatively, if you just want to wait and see what comes out of his brain over the next few months, that'll be fine too!

Military Base has an average score of 9.39 and Soviet Town has 9.40 (694 votes cast). I don't think we'll be able to add three tilesets to the game given we've already got two to do, so I think we might have to discount the bottom one of the three. Reaper Hive, if it stays like this.

Level Designer rounded the first corner in the lead but has stumbled at the first hedge and Indoor Missions is practically alongside him into the second corner. Soviet Town is a couple of lengths behind, a nose in front of Military Base. Still in touch but trailing a little behind the front four is Female Soldiers, fighting it out with Reaper Hive. Blaster Bombs / Human Psionics has taken a tumble at the first and is limping badly. His owner didn't want to him to race; judging from the noise from the crowd it seems like they don't either...

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Mac / Linux port is coming up in dead last. It has a whole bunch of votes at "14" and a bunch of votes at "1" and not a lot in between. Guess we might have to pay for that one ourselves then

If it's anything like the Grand National we'll end up with the level designer breaking his legs..

Re: the poll, no, there isn't. And in fact I have to pay £24.99 to see the results, as you only get the first 100 results free. Bastards. Based on the first hundred results, level design is winning, with tilesets and female soldiers are putting in a strong showing too.

Miles, these forums are meant to be enjoyed by everyone, including children. Don't call other forum users douches, please. It's rude, and seems a little inconsistent given what you've just said above.

Gorlom - vehicles will gain experience. When the vehicle is obselete, you lose that experience. It shouldn't exactly be game breaking though (and someone who is really good at driving an armoured car might not be good at driving the new vehicle anyway). Miles - Smoke grenades are already in the game actually, just not in the public build. I don't want to add major gameplay mechanics like prone etc with the Kickstarter, essentially because they'd have a major effect on the combat model and I think we're too late in development to make a change that big (also I'd argue the squad sizes are too large for it, as opposed to 4-6 as in JA2). Re: the women, we actually put it at $200k because we thought it would excite people more than the other stuff and they'd be willing to raise their pledge to get it. So it's esssentially the opposite of the conclusions you've drawn, although I can see why you'd think that in hindsight.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think would be a good idea - they stay the same size for usability reasons (and the icon scaling would be difficult too, as Gorlom says).

Yeah the updated UI will have the coloured bars we all know and love.

Fair point.

Yeah, it's unrealistic but removing the shroud would make the game a lot less exciting. It's not present on Base Defence maps tho.

Hehe, up to 12 slots? Yeah, maybe. Everyone would be trading codes on the forum for all the Let's Plays...

Yeah. There is a soldier role button planned but I guess we could stick a weapon icon on the portrait that pops up when you mouseover the quickbutton too. I'll put it on my list of beta UI tweaks.

Yeah, there'll be more map variation in the final game, although there's always going to be a certain regularity to the maps because they are made of square / rectangular blocks. There's currently only one map per tileset per UFO type.