Chris

@Nodrak so I think there's a couple of things to discuss here. I think the first is you're giving the AI way too much credit and then working backwards from that to draw conclusions about the game mechanics. Why didn't that Wraith shoot the guy behind the box and kill him? I genuinely don't know, and I'd expect it to do that. If you can provide the save I'll ask the AI programmer to take a look. At present the AI will make the combination of attacks with the highest chance of hitting given the TU it has available, and the only explanation I can think of is perhaps the TU cost of rotating towards the box soldier would take it below the threshold needed to perform an extra attack (or a more expensive one) so it shot a target in front of it instead, even though that unit had a shield (which the AI doesn't consider). But it could also be a bug in the AI decision-making. It's nice to know the AI is good enough that people ascribe it intelligence but the rules are fairly simple in places. It has the advantage of being able to see the most TU efficient tiles to stand in while performing the most TU efficient attack combination to score hits, but beyond that it's not that advanced. It only uses grenades when your soldiers are grouped together, for example. It's purely random whether an alien decides to open the front door of a UFO and look whether you've got units stacked there. So don't read too much into what it's doing. If there was a bug where it became possible to shoot through building corners, the AI would immediately start using that against you, but for more complex stuff? It's just not that clever. The second issue is this "bug", which I'm still not understanding. Firstly, can you explain how you managed to fire at that soldier in the previous example if the game wouldn't let you take a 0% shot? Because it's quite important for me to understand what's going on. Then can you give me a more detailed explanation of what you mean by this? What do you actually mean when you say the actual hit chance is 12.5%? Where are you getting that 12.5% number from? Because if you're aiming at an enemy and the cursor displays 0% hit chance, you should have exactly 0% hit chance against them. If you've got a save where you can take a 0% shot at a target and actually hit them, please post it up. That would be a serious bug. I don't think it's really worth commenting on the rest until I fully understand what you're trying to say here. But to answer the question about armour destruction - yes, that should also fall off with range. The grenade problems are a separate unrelated issue, one that should be fixed in 6.23.2. But they use an entirely different hit calculation / projectile arc / miss scatter model to normal direct fire weapons so they're probably not very relevant to this discussion.

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 build fixes some more bugs found by the community over the weekend, and found by our own testing. We'll probably do some further testing tomorrow to ensure these fixes haven't created any new bugs, and if we're happy with the stability we'll then launch it onto the public branches. Gameplay Changes: Slightly adjusted the crews loadouts of the Abduction sites at about day 190 and 250. These both previously used a mix of plasma and fusion weapons. The first site now uses entirely plasma (as it's too early for fusion weapons), and the second site now uses entirely fusion (as it's too late for plasma). Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur after losing a base defence mission. Fixed an issue where Servitors would be invisible until damaged. Fixed an issue where the Cyberdrone frontal shield 3d model would be missing, even if the shield was still intact. Fixed a bug where the UFO hull would not be hidden if the UFO door was opened during the alien turn, but would then immediately disappear as soon as you moved a soldier during your own turn. Fixed an issue where the game would sometimes show a 100% hit chance with a grenade but then that grenade path would always fail. Fixed healed HP being removed when transitioning from ENDGAME part 1 to part 2. Fixed a minor issue with part of the the Singularity Core model clipping through the floor. Improved the visuals for the damaged states of the various alien base wall screens.

@Nodrak OK, some thoughts on your mission playthrough: You should absolutely take the first shot against the Heavy Servitor in the screenshot. You're slightly beyond weapon range so it'll do reduced damage but there's no downside, particularly as those enemies can't reaction fire. And there's only a 3% chance of missing. I don't really see that there's any bug in the situation where you have an Andron looking into your dropship. You can't suppress robots, but Androns have low Reflexes so you won't get reaction fired unless a soldier drops to relatively low TU, and you really don't want it reaction firing into your dropship because it'll suppress everyone. If you don't know how Initiative works for reaction fire then it's worth reading the tooltips on that, as it'll make a big difference here. Anyway, you've got a few options to deal with the situation: Advance with the shield guy, then shoot the Andron with the shield guy until his TU drop low enough to bait out the reaction fire (which should be angled away from the rest of your team). You can do the same with a MARS or a Colossus, which might be able to tank the damage, or just your most expendable soldier. Alternatively toss a Demo grenade at it to shred its cover and armour and then just wreck it with rifles / sniper rifles. If you're not going to kill it, you can toss a smoke at it so it'll have very low accuracy reaction fire. If cover is crushable, you have to path through it to crush it - the game doesn't let you simply walk onto the tile containing the cover. But I can't remember if the full height wood stacks are crushable. I think the LMG 0% shot might be the crux of the issue. How did you force the shot if the game was preventing you from doing it? I assume you chose to aim at the ground a few ties in front of the target, right? Because that's the big accuracy hack in the game (same as in Xeno 1). If you aim directly at an alien, then any miss shots are disallowed from hitting that alien. But if you aim at the ground just in front or behind it, then the miss shots suddenly can hit that alien because you're no longer aiming at it - and we've got no way of knowing whether the player is actually aiming for the floor or instead trying to cheese hits on the alien. We could fix it by making miss shots have more deviation, but we get endless complaints if miss shots fly well wide of the target as it looks silly (even novices can shoot in the general direction of a target). The solution which we've had in place since Xeno 1 was to set units to have a 25% stopping chance unless they were being specifically targeted, which means a miss shot passing through their tile should only hit them 1/4 of the time. If you did actually get 4 hits from a 10-round burst in this setup then you got very lucky even if every single miss shot passed through the alien's tile. Unless the system is malfunctioning, which it perhaps could be. Damage is only applied at the end of a burst. We do get complaints that you can blast 10 rounds at a thin wall and you've got no chance of injuring a unit stood immediately behind it, and we'll fix that in M7 if we get time. Shooting beyond range reduces the damage done. You can shoot a unit 40 tiles away if you want, but you're not going to hurt it much. I think if you're testing this stuff you might want to enable the damage numbers in the campaign options. That said, I hadn't quite realised how much stacking accuracy could allow you to shoot beyond max range and I might need to tweak the formulas to make it fall off faster. Shields are overpowered at present; they're too reliable at blocking damage. They'll be getting slightly nerfed on the higher difficulty settings in M7. The Colossus is still underpowered in M6. We did make some improvements compared to earlier iterations, but not enough to stop it being underwhelming.

As Kouki has mentioned already, we appreciate the depth you've gone into here. Note that I wrote this post before your post with all the pictures from your Harvester mission, so I'll post another one below in reply to that. It's possible that will explain some of my questions but I've already written this mini-essay so I can't be bothered to revise it! Basically, I guess I'd like you to clarify some of these issues a bit more. It seems to me like you've identified some balance issues with specific weapons, and some examples where the systems aren't working quite as intended, and then you've drawn some conclusions from them. I don't think I'm entirely understanding some of your conclusions, but let's work through the first two categories first. Weapon Balance Issues: You've spotted a bug with the Cleaner Accelerated Rifles, which I'll patch in the next hotfix for M6. These are meant to have identical stats to the human versions, but the range bonuses have got out of sync. This feeds into a broader issue where the alien weapons have differing range bonuses to the human equivalents, which they shouldn't really. I'll fix it so that alien rifles have the same range bonuses as human rifles, but I'll do that in Milestone 7 because this will potentially significantly affect the game balance and it's too late in the day to do this in M7. Yes, I could believe that pistols are a bit too strong at the moment. I'm not sure what the table you've made showing pistol vs shotgun means though - I understand the axes, but what are the actual values in the table? Expected total damage? Cumulative accuracy? Regarding sniper rifles: I noticed a bug where the low-TU fire mode had a 40 No Move bonus, which was meant to be 20. I'll fix that. Yes, it's true that a soldier with ~63 accuracy can get a guaranteed hit on an alien stood out in the open if they use the best fire mode, but I don't think that's a massive problem. You could make the argument that the shot accuracy could be a bit lower, but they can only fire once per turn and there's usually intervening cover in the way, and if you move more than about 5 tiles you won't have enough TU to fire it. Having high accuracy is still valuable because it does negate cover, or permits a soldier to reliably use the lower accuracy fire mode to give them more TU to play with. Why would you expect an alien plasma rifle to be more accurate than a human sniper rifle? That's apples and oranges. Overall, I'm not sure I see the major issues you seem to be implying in your post - basically the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle gets about 10% higher hit chance at most ranges than it should? And the pistols are a bit stronger than they should be? Although those are issues, for me that doesn't add up to a player having a dramatically different experience to what you'd expect. So maybe I'm missing something. Mechanical Issues: In general, I'm 99.9% certain that the RNG and shooting numbers are working as intended. By which I mean that I don't think there's a bug causing reaction fire shots to be more accurate than normal shots, or that short-range burst fire has a hidden hit penalty. In fact, I think on the experimental game branch it might print the shot debug info in the logs so you can check the hit chance vs the hit rolls if you want to see yourself. I think short-range burst fire has been made weaker compared to X1, though. The short range bonus in X1 was much stronger but only kicked in over 5 tiles, whereas in X2 it kicks in over a longer distance but totals to less at point-blank range. But the hit chance values on the cursor are most likely correct. Is your suggestion that Armour Accuracy penalties be multipliers (e.g. -10%) rather than a flat -5? So then they'd affect high accuracy soldiers more? Again, I'm not entirely clear what your tables are saying when it comes to the relationship between small / large enemy sizes and the short range bonus. Could you further explain your argument that this unduly benefits rifles / sniper rifles? Why would crouching affect the range bonus? The short range bonus reflects the fact that the target is larger when it is closer to you, and the long range penalty that a projectile becomes less effective beyond its maximum range. The crouch bonus modifies your accuracy because it makes it easier to shoot more accurately at the target, which is a different thing. Plus in game terms the shotgun gets most of its accuracy from being close to the target and I don't it to get a huge extra bonus simply because the soldier also crouched (and the reasons why the long range penalties aren't affected should be self-evident). Conclusions: I don't understand what you mean by the % hit chance being more like a "shot difficulty" value, and to be honest this makes me think you might have misunderstood something important along the way. Basically the game rolls a random 100 against the hit chance you see on the cursor, and if you roll less than or equal to that number then the shot hits. Even if that means the bullet has to clip through something solid or that the soldier has to contort in a ridiculous way to find a shot path capable of hitting the target collider. If the roll is higher than the hit chance, then the game runs a "miss" shot calculation and figures out the potential deviation and what intervening cover can be hit. That calculation isn't perfect (there's a few things I'd tweak if we have time) but the shot is prevented from hitting the target even if the soldier has to contort ridiculously to find a way to not shoot their target. That said, it'd still be interesting to hear what you think is going on, because the symptoms might be worth discussion even if you've misdiagnosed the disease. You've not explained your argument that miss shots are more dangerous than they should be, but you also mention that miss shots are too accurate further down. Could you elaborate?

We'll be looking at the HEVY arcs properly in M7, as we're aware it's still not working like it should. The suggestion for a subtle trail on grenades is a good idea. I'll note it down and we'll probably implement it if it's simple, but there's no guarantee we'll have time to get to it before release.

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! As we were planning to leave 6.22.0 on the Experimental branch over the weekend anyway, we thought we'd release another batch of hotfixes before then. We're still planning to release onto the public branches on Monday if no further serious bugs are found over the weekend. Gameplay Changes: One of our bugfixes has addressed an issue where autoresolved air combat was sometimes far less effective than it should be (mostly when using interceptors equipped with torpedoes). The various types of Cleaner interrogation projects now all mark the appropriate captured cleaner item as Junk. Bugfixes: Fixed a bug that was reducing the effectiveness of torpedoes in some autoresolved air combats. Fixed being able to stack together the Retreat speed bonus and the Afterburner speed bonus. Fixed some shroud-related issues with the Singularity Core object in the Battleship. Fixed some of the engineering projects having placeholder tooltips.

The interrogation being autocomplete is intentional, but I'll fix the issue with the item not being flagged as junk.

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! We were hoping 6.21.0 would be ready for public release, but player testing suggested it needed another round of fixes first. We'll leave this build on the Experimental branch over the weekend and then release onto the public branches on Monday if no further serious bugs are found. Balance Changes: Fusion weapons now cause 5 Armour Destruction per shot (up from 3). Vehicle cannons now have double the damage / armour pen / armour destruction of the equivalent rifles, which works out a nerf for early-game cannons and a buff for late-game cannons: All cannons now have 24 range. Previously they had 20 range, but were bugged and would actually increase their hit chance beyond this point. Ballistic Cannon - damage now 68 (down from 70), armour destruction now 4 (down from 10) Laser Cannon - damage now 80 (down from 95), armour destruction now 16 (up from 10) Gauss Cannon - armour penetration now 20 (up from 0), armour destruction now 8 (down from 10) Fusion cannon - damage now 144 (down from 150), armour penetration now 30 (up from 0) Added 1-4 extra enemies to the Cleaner Base mission, depending on difficulty setting. Updated the UOO Bridge Assault mission so that it has slightly fewer aliens in the main room, and a few more weaker enemies spread out through the edges of the map. Gameplay Changes: We've improved the way grenades work in several ways: We've fixed the bug where any missed grenade throw inside a building or in an alien / Xenonaut base map would always hit the ceiling directly above the thrower and explode. Grenade arcs can now be a bit flatter, which means grenades are less likely to strike the ceiling in general. If a grenade throw path has a 0% hit chance because of a blocking object, the throw path now renders red beyond that object / ceiling tile. This should make it easier to see what is actually blocking the throw, We've also fixed an issue where the game would display a positive hit chance for a particular tile, but then incorrectly refuse to let you throw at that tile (as if you had a 0% chance). Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where base defence missions would allow you to use soldiers to defend the base who were already in an airborne dropship, which would then cause the game to be in a broken state on the Geoscape. Fixed a bug where you could sometimes take sentry guns on normal missions when using advanced dropships. Fixed the UFO outer doors sometimes not rendering correctly if the UFO is sighted in the shroud before the soldier has direct line of sight on the door itself. Fixed Cyberdrones that are killed on impact in crash sites not appearing visually dead. Fixed the Doomsday Counter tooltip on the strategy layer not including the +Doomsday values generated by the difficulty setting (which is usually +1 or +2 per day). Fixed a bug on the UOO Sabotage mission where the aliens could use some of the "teleporter" tiles in the Xenonaut spawn zone as actual teleporters, and attack your soldiers from behind. Fixed the MARS having the incorrect movement sound when using its light armour variant. Fixed some wooden plank tall props not having a 100% blocking chance. Fixed a building on a Boreal map that didn't have an internal floor.

If this is an issue in milestone 5 then I don't think we can fix it; we're focusing on Milestone 6 now (which should release in a few days) and switching back to 5 to debug a save from that version takes too long. However from memory I think there may be a bug in Milestone 5 about Endgame launching and having soldiers / dropships at a secondary base confusing the game. Can you try loading an earlier save from before the Endgame launch, but then move all your soldiers and dropships to your original base (and sell the ones you don't need) before you try to launch Endgame?

That's a separate issue though - vision cones are slightly more than 90 degrees, which you can see in other parts of the game too.

There's nothing we can do about this unfortunately. Windows are always the full width of the tile in game terms; it'd look natural enough if the windows were as wide as the other type of sawmill window you see on the sides of the building but that'd make the game look visually boring. EDIT - well, maybe there is something we can do. But at present this isn't really a bug, and fixing it would involve making further changes to the LOS system. I'll check with the coders if my suggested solution is potentially possible.

Thanks. We'll look into this - we appreciate the detailed bug report!

Thanks, but unfortunately it looks like this save is from the start of the UOO Bridge Assault mission, so it's a bit too early in the campaign to use.

As long as you're not actively feeding assets from the game into an AI (which is potentially giving the AI ownership over them), then you're free to create or share your creations however you like.

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! As this build fixes the last remaining critical issues in Milestone 6, we'll release this build onto the public branches as the first Milestone 6 Stable build next week if our players do not encounter any serious issues over the weekend. Bugfixes: Fixed the Abductor hull not hiding correctly when the main door is opened. Fixed an issue where certain tiles around the outer edge of the UFO interior would be visible in the shroud. Various visual fixes to a selection of tactical maps.

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 fixes most of the remaining issues blocking the Milestone 6 public release, but there are still some problems with the Abductor UFO hull revealing that need to be corrected (hopefully we can debug that tomorrow). Balancing: ENDGAME part 1 reinforcement timer increased by 1 turn, and four extra alien Praetorian-ranked aliens added to the mission. There's also now dedicated spawn points for the enemy noncombatants, so they always spawn inside buildings. Bugfixes: Fixed Sentry Guns being automatically assigned to ENDGAME / UOO mission strike teams, and crashing the game if you actually tried to bring them on the mission. Fixed various display issues for the multi-level UFOs in the tactical combat (except the Abductor, which we're still looking into). Fixed the game completion achievement not always correctly unlocking after you win the campaign. Fixed the engineering screen UI resizing itself when you add the MARS / ARES rebuild projects to the queue. Fixed the default soldier arrangement for the Pegasus dropship spawning a couple of soldiers inside diagonal wall tiles. Fixed the roof tiles on the ENDGAME part 1 mission not being properly destructible. Fixed some of the walls in the UOO Sabotage mission not visually updating their appearance when destroyed, and still looking undamaged. Fixed the vehicle Heavy Reinforced Armour incorrectly being called the Heavy Ceramite Armour. Fixed the ENDGAME part 1 intro incorrectly referring to the Pegasus.

Hello everyone - October is now finished, so it's time for our monthly progress update. I'll be keeping things brief this month! Milestone 6 & 7: We had hoped to release Milestone 6 onto the public branch last month, but unfortunately we've been dealing with a couple of rather thorny UFO-related bugs in the shroud / line of sight system. These are now fixed and what we hope will be the public release of Milestone 6 has been compiled and released onto the Experimental branch. Assuming no serious bugs are found over the weekend, we'll then release it onto the standard branches next week. We'll probably continue to patch Milestone 6 for another week or two, as there's a couple of annoying visual bugs in the game that we still want to fix (such as certain tiles incorrectly drawing under the shroud, etc). We'll also make it a priority to fix any bugs that are reported by the community after the public release. Aside from the programmer working on fixing those key bugs, most of our team moved on to Milestone 7 towards the end of last month. That update will be the final launch update for Xenonauts 2, and we'll be focusing primarily on polish and performance - however, we are still planning to add some extra content to the game in the update, and we've started by working on that. Strategy UI Background Updates: The most noticeable piece of new content will be the strategy UI background illustrations changing and updating as the game progresses and the player unlocks new technology. This feature existed in the original Xenonauts and was very well received; players felt it made the game feel much more reactive and immersive to get to see how the new technology impacted the day-to-day life of the Xenonauts. We've actually been working on these in the background for several months now. The artwork is already complete for the Research and Engineering screen backgrounds / characters, but the work of integrating them into the game only began at the start of this month. We still have to finish the new background illustrations for the Base Stores and the Soldier screens (which are the other two that upgrade), but we're expecting to have everything wrapped up in the next couple of months. I've attached an example of the updated artwork above. Aircraft Equipment Visualisation: In a similar vein to the background illustrations, we've been working on a proper "paperdoll" system for the Aircraft screen. The idea here is simple - the artwork for your interceptors should accurately reflect the equipment and upgrades that you've chosen for them. If you're equipping them with missiles, you see missiles appearing under the wings. If you've run the engineering upgrade project to give it improved engines, the artwork for the interceptor updates to show a more advanced engine, etc. We started working on the art assets for this task last month, and we'll be starting on the code implementation for it this month. Balancing Playthrough: Last month I did another campaign balancing / testing session. As always, this was rather time-consuming - the campaign I completed took about 35 hours, and there were also a couple of other shorter campaigns before that that were ended by serious bugs. Nonetheless, it was time well spent. We identified a lot of minor polish and balancing issues that we were able to fix relatively quickly and roll into the Milestone 6 builds. However, we also pushed a number of tasks back into Milestone 7, and we've been busy working on those over the past couple of weeks. Some of these were bugfixes that we didn't want to include in Milestone 6 because they risked introducing new bugs or breaking save game compatibility, whereas others were larger balancing changes that we'll implement as a group before we start our Milestone 7 playthroughs. Finally, playing the game for an extended period of time has been valuable for our planning process. There's only so much development time remaining before we leave Early Access, and we're not going to have time to polish or improve everything we'd like - so having a better understanding of how much each individual issue affects gameplay makes it much easier to make sensible decisions about what we should prioritise. Additional Maps: Another thing that has become obvious after repeated playtesting campaigns is that the game needs some additional maps for the early-game UFOs. There's currently three maps per biome for the small UFOs (Scout, Destroyer, Observer), which is enough that you shouldn't see repeats within a single campaign - but many users will restart the campaign at least once, and will therefore end up playing the early-game content multiple times. We've already started work on two extra maps per biome for the small UFOs, which should hopefully address the problem. We're hoping these new maps will all be complete by the time we release the first test versions of Milestone 7, which will probably be early in the new year. I think that covers everything we did last month. As always, thanks for reading, and I'll write another update in a few weeks!

There's not really much counterplay to mind control though. It's a nice reward to get full control of your soldier back if you can deal with the alien that is controlling them, in my experience. Sentry Guns already only have 40 TU, which makes them the slowest enemy type. And both Sentry Guns and Androns already have very low Reflexes (about 30) which means they're already highly vulnerable to melee attack. Not all other enemies have over 55 TU either. The Cyberdrone, Mentarch and Biter all also have 40 TU.

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! We're close to releasing Milestone 6 to the public now - we've fixed most of the remaining critical issues, and we're just trying to find a fix for the visual issues players will experience with UFO hull hiding on all UFOs from the Abductor onwards. Assuming no further serious bugs are reported by testers over the weekend, we should be on track for a release next week. Changes: Updated the air combat UI to move the "UFO Charge Time" bar to the bottom of the screen and make it more obvious. It now has a label, a tooltip and a countdown too. Added a new "UFO Escaped" air combat result, which makes it more obvious when the combat has ended because the UFO has charged its hyperdrive and jumped away. Added new fire sounds for the ballistic SMG. Further improved the camera tracking for long-ranged shooting / shooting between levels. Balancing: Geoscape: The start of Phase 4 has been moved forwards three days. Reduced the maximum range of the Phantom and Gemini interceptors by 15-20%. Lasers now cost slightly more Alenium to build, and the Guardian Armour Protection upgrade now costs 50 Alenium and 25 Alloys (previously 30 Alloys). Tactical Module upgrade now costs 20 Alenium in addition to its 20 Alloy cost. Air Combat: UFO Observer max speed has been slightly reduced so that an Angel on afterburner can (slowly) catch it. Size of the deployment area has been reduced in scenarios where the UFOs are attacking you, preventing the player from deploying their fighters quite so close to the attacking UFOs. Retreat mode now boosts your speed as if you had triggered the afterburners. Afterburners can no longer be triggered when in Retreat mode. Tactical Combat: When units suffer a morale break, they now have a 50% chance of Panicking and 25% chance of Fleeing or Berserking (previously 33% each). This change has been made because it's not particularly fun to have aliens Berserking too often. Mind Controlled Xenonauts that return to your control during your turn (i.e. because you killed or suppressed the psionic alien responsible) now regain all of their TU. Gauss weapons now carry 20% less ammo in each magazine. Most alien species now have scaling Bravery values - noncombatants have reduced bravery, basic soldiers remain the same, higher ranks now have somewhat higher bravery. Enemies should start becoming harder to suppress from roughly the point you encounter Observer UFOs. Sebillians now have scaling Regeneration - soldiers remain at +50HP, but elites + officers now have +75HP and praetorians + leaders +100HP. High Eternal now has 500 HP (up from 200HP) and +150 Regeneration (up from 100). Removed one alien from the first Alien Base mission on non-Commander difficulty settings. Various changes made to the UOO Sabotage mission: Increased the reinforcement timer by 2 turns. Fewer of the enemies have Fusion weapons. Various changes made to the UOO Bridge Assault mission: Starting alien crew increased in number, but a larger percentage of them are now alien noncombatants with plasma weapons (rather than praetorian-rank aliens with fusion weapons). Reinforcement timer increased by 1. Alien reinforcements are now roughly half praetorians with fusion weapons, rather than all being elites with plasma weapons. At the end of the mission, items are only recovered from the tiles that contain Xenonaut units (alive or dead), rather than all tiles. This means you'll always recover your own soldiers and equipment but you won't recover any loot from the aliens (unless you pick it up). Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur during the character conversations if you press spacebar in the frame before it properly loads. Fixed a crash that would occur if you double clicked a "rescue" soldier in the Soldier Rescue mission pre-mission soldier equip screen. Fixed a problem where the building roofs on the UOO-1 Sabotage mission were not hiding when a unit went inside the building. Fixed a secondary problem with the roof hiding on the central building of the UOO-1 Sabotage mission. Fixed the ARES turning invisible when it takes damage. Fixed a problem with the Harvester UFO where the interior could be revealed through the hull. Fixed zombies hatching into Reaper after 2 turns, even if the zombie had been killed. Fixed an issue where many autoresolved air combats would incorrectly result in a draw because the UFO was escaping too quickly. Fixed engineering queue projects snapping way off to the right when you were dragging them to reposition them in the list. Fixed several UI issues on 5:4 screens (and other rare aspect ratios). Fixed armoured Psyons breaking their left arms when performing their fire animations. Fixed the Geoscape map scrolling having a visual "jump" when you scrolled far enough to wrap on the right edge of the screen. Fixed a visual issue with the shadow on the Observer. Fixed the UFOs inside the alien base maps not hiding their hulls correctly. Fixed a bug where using the shoot+move preview on a cloaked Wraith would show the incorrect hit chance value (it would apply the cloaking value from the current soldier location). Fixed jungle swamps hiding the fire path tiles if they passed over them. Fixed blood pools not being hidden when camera level changes. Fixed a particular type of hair incorrectly obstruction shading. Fixed the Soviet Town factory double door open position in gameplay terms not matching their visual position. Fixed a flicker on the Colossus fire animation. Lots of fixes to various tactical maps / tiles.

Thanks. Can you provide a save game next time you see it happen? The UFO is able to escape from combat if the combat is not ended quickly enough, which is why it jumps away on the Geoscape (we need to better explain this mechanic), but it does sound like something is going a bit wrong with the autoresolve. The Observer is fast enough to outrun an Angel in 6.18 but that shouldn't be relevant in the autoresolve, and the scout and destroyer aren't that fast anyway.

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! There's only a handful of key bugs we still need to clear before we can release Milestone 6 to the public (plus any other serious bugs reported by the community). These known bugs are: Non-experimental Milestone 6 builds have a number of tactical combat tiles rendering black for some reason "Miss" grenade throws almost always explode on top of the thrower if there is a roof above them The roof hiding on the UOO-1 Sabotage map doesn't work properly in some parts of the central building Fire and transparent objects are still incorrectly drawing below the shroud Changes: Improved lots of Soviet Town assets that were having issues with their destruction states. Units now correctly reset their idle animation after finishing a move, which should prevent units jerking noticeably. Another set of translation fixes and updates. A few map fixes. Moved the air combat evasive roll button tooltips so they don't obscure the other nearby buttons. Balancing: First terror site was made slightly easier by reducing the number of aliens by one. Fixed one terror site map that seemed significantly harder than the others (the Western Town one where you start in the middle of the map), by adding a bit more cover near the dropship and moving some of the alien spawns further away from the dropship. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur at end of turn on tactical missions. Fixed a crash that could occur when a Gemini interceptor was shot down in the air combat. Fixed a specific Soviet Town map that contained a corrupted asset that would break any save games made in that map. Fixed the cursor snapping to doors when you were trying to move units behind them. Fixed an instance where units like the Mentarch could bleed to death without triggering their death animation (leaving them hovering in the air). Fixed a couple of issues that could be caused by aborting stage 1 and stage 2 of ENDGAME. Fixed dragging-and-dropping certain UI elements having incorrect alignment on non-1080p screens. Fixed a Rescue Mission map where the soldiers were incorrectly split across two buildings. Fixed shields displaying that they could be equipped in the "Container" slot, which confused players into thinking it could be placed in the Backpack. Fixed some of the strange move paths that could be generated when trying to path into a shrouded part of a UFO. Fixed the X role icon not showing an icon in the tactical combat UI. Fixed the Sentinel System module incorrectly reporting a vision arc twice what it should be on the tooltip. Fixed all the remaining known broken translation strings.

You misunderstand my point. I'm not saying that we don't struggle to hit deadlines, but the problem isn't content - as of Milestone 6, the game is effectively content complete. I think people will enjoy the couple of extra bits of content we're adding in Milestone 7 but we're not going to be adding any more new aliens, or missions, or biomes, etc. What we're actually struggling with is a long list of bugs to fix, and gameplay systems that could do with a bit of a rework. There's a lot of tidying up that needs to be done, and that's what we've spent our time doing rather than adding new content. The problem is that lots of the things you're suggesting are gameplay features - they're existing systems that could do with a rework so they work differently. Fix the grenade launcher so it has a different ballistics model. Allow the Colossus to carry items that it cannot use. Make it so that shields and the Colossus block 100% of the shots passing through their tiles. They're all reasonable requests but they're not just changing balancing numbers, they require a coder to sit down and spend several hours working on them. So you're not asking us to focus on the game balance (which we're already doing), you're actually asking us to prioritise spending dev time on the polishing work you personally think is most important. Problem is, I could ask ten people on the forums what they think are the most important issues affecting tactical combat and I'd probably get ten different answers. I really don't think that, say, "light armour not allowing soldiers to throw grenades further" would be mentioned by many other people. They'd have their own ideas. Plus, you also shouldn't confuse things I don't want to fix because I don't agree they are issues (shotgun range, using alien grenades, smoke radiuses, the Colossus power fist weapon) with stuff I do agree is an issue but we just don't have the bandwidth to fix right now. Some of the stuff we hope to fix in Milestone 7. Other stuff, I don't think needs fixing - but once the mod tools are done, you'll be able to mod it yourself if it bothers you.

I admit it does all start to blur together now, we’ve been through so many iterations. Phase 1 is longer in M6 than in M5 though isn’t it?

I wiped twice on it in my recent Veteran playthrough, although that's possibly because the AI was still using burst fire on their accelerated rifles and just deleting my soldiers from full health. Remember it happens earlier in M6 than it does in M5 so most players won't have Guardian armour by the time they fight the mission, nor the Dragonfly, and you're up against Accelerated weapons and some armoured aliens that also have Plasma weapons. And you have fewer soldiers. So I'd definitely try it again and see what you think - but even then, bear in mind you're a very experienced player and a lot of people would be going into Veteran blind both tactically and strategically. I don't think we're struggling to deliver content - if it's not content that excites you, that's fine, but that's not the same thing as content not being delivered. We've already made pretty extensive improvements to the ground combat balance in M6 and we're locking it down for final release once the bugfixes are done. Some of the stuff on your list is things we might consider in M7, but the only thing that we'll hopefully be addressing in M6 (or shortly afterwards) is the grenade / HEVY miss paths and how frequently they blow up the soldier trying to use it.

Thanks. Yeah, this is a tooltip error - the Container isn't the backpack, and it's not something that should be displayed to the player. I can see why that would confuse you. I'll get it fixed.