Chris

Thanks. Yes, this is a good suggestion. We'll get this updated for the next fix.

I thought it’d be best to create a separate thread for the balance in V27 where people can post thoughts or questions.

Closed Beta Build V26 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch (unless you're part of our Steam Playtest, in which case you don't have to change branches at all!) so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). This is a major update for the game that includes a lot of changes, both in terms of new content and updated balance. The changelog isn't comprehensive, particularly with regards to the balance changes! We're planning to start locking down the game to new features in preparation for Early Access now, and we'll be concentrating on bugfixes, adding new art / writing to the research tree, and creating some new levels. I'll also be making balance tweaks as required, but nothing transformative. Please let us know if you encounter any bugs in the game. There's quite a few known bugs in the tactical combat we're aware of but just haven't had time to fix yet, so I've provided a list of known bugs at the bottom of this thread - there's no need to report these bugs if you do see them. Summary: Campaign Difficulty Options: when you start a new campaign, you are now presented with a large number of options that show what each difficulty setting is changing. You can also change these manually to make your own custom difficulty setting if you want. VETERAN DIFFICULTY NOW DISABLES THINGS - e.g. units no longer show their HP above their heads, it costs TU to rotate while firing weapons, etc. It's therefore much more of a "classic" (and much more difficult) experience than Soldier difficulty. Updated Soldier Equip & Aircraft Screens: these two Geoscape screens have been restyled in their final look, along with all their child screens (like create new loadout etc). There's also been a significant number of usability changes on both screens. Cleaner Network: the Cleaner missions have changed, and are no longer linked to research. The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now spawns automatically about a week into the campaign, and once that is complete the Cleaner Network progress bar is shown. Once this reaches 100%, the Cleaner Base is revealed and can be attacked, which ends all Cleaner activity if successful. However at 100% all Cleaner activity also inflicts 50% reduced Panic so it's worth revealing the Base as quickly as possible even if you don't launch the mission straight away. You get +1% progress per day passively once the Cleaner Intel Hub is completed, but each Cleaner Data item recovered from the Intel Hub or the new Cleaner Cell missions will provide +2% progress each. Capturing the VIP alive at a Cleaner Cell provides +15% progress. Cleaner Cells: these are three optional missions unlocked as soon as the Intel Hub mission is completed. They are elimination missions where the objective is simply to kill the VIP and then return to your dropship, grabbing as much Cleaner Data as possible on the way. Destroying a Cell will permanently stop Cleaner activity in the two linked funding regions. Each of the three Cells has a unique buff - either the enemies have more powerful weapons, are better armoured, or are backed up by Sentry Guns. The Cleaner Base has all three of these buffs, but destroying the corresponding Cell will remove that buff from the Cleaner Base. Conversations & Text: I've added a number of character conversations in the early part of the game, and reworked some research text as the result of tech tree changes. I'll be adding more of both as we release the hotfixes for V27. Changelog - Strategy: General - the tech tree has been reworked quite heavily again. General - Autopsies and UFO datacore research projects now go straight into the Xenopedia without being displayed. This is mostly to prevent the player being spammed with too many popups after a mission. General - added a number of new buttons to the Main Menu that link to our social media channels and what will become the game's wiki (feel free to start filling this in if you want). General - Cleaner activity now comes in the form of anomalies, rather than just being a monthly popup. Early game anomalies are generally more subtle to fit the "secret war" theme. General - added the Smoke Launcher back into the MARS. General - weapons with ammo regeneration (e.g. Advanced Lasers) now display this on the tooltip. General - fixed the mission debrief "Aliens Killed" line not including captured aliens, which was confusing people. General - fixed various visual issues with the UI on 21:9 screens. Main Base - demolishing a building on the Main Base screen now lists the amount of money to be refunded. Engineering - projects that can only be built once now display "Unique" in their quantity field. Soldier Equip - the soldier category tabs now all have icons (with unique icons per dropship type), and all display the number of soldiers there. Soldier Equip - there's now an Auto-Fill Dropship button that means you don't manually need to assign soldiers to all empty slots. Soldier Equip - display the soldier HP in brackets after their name if not at full health. Soldier Equip - closing the Create New Loadout panel can now be done with Esc, and no longer creates the new loadout anyway. Soldier Equip - Armour attachments (like the Jetpack) now show the appropriate tooltip on hover over the button on Soldier Equip screen. Aircraft - on the dropship panel, right clicking any soldier in the list will remove them from the dropship. Left-clicking an empty slot will open the soldier assignment panel. Bugfix- you can no longer avoid a base defence mission entirely just by pressing Esc to close the "Your base is under attack!" popup. Bugfix- Cleaner Base mission can no longer be targetted by alien Resupply missions. Bugfix - fixed Strength modifiers not correctly updating the carrying capacity of the soldier. Bugfix - fixed the Recruit Soldier panel reversing the sort order every time you clicked a new heading or recruited a soldier. Bugfix - fixed the base defence turret damage seemingly not being randomised correctly. Bugfix - fixed the Base Defence squad not allowing you to assign soldiers to it in some circumstances. Bugfix - fixed a bug where items being transferred to a base would appear on the Soldier Equip screen, but then not be interactive. Bugfix - fixed various bugs with the Sentry Gun and its equipment. Changelog - Air Combat: Air Combat default speed is now setting 2, with setting 1 now being half speed. Air combat deployment area is now the frontal 180 degree arc of the UFO, rather than a full circle. Aircraft Armour is no longer instantly healed after combat, but is repaired back at base like HP. Bugfix - UI toggles like Retreat / Afterburners now visually toggle on correctly if you activate them via hotkey. Bugfix - missiles in air combat no longer sometimes hit their target instantly, rather than having to fly over to it. Bugfix - weapons in air combat (particularly missiles) no longer sometimes fire at the wrong target. Changelog - Tactical Combat: Combat shields have been updated to work like they did in Xenonauts 1. However, the shield on the Cyberdrone has not changed and still provides a directional Armour boost rather than a HP boost. Injured soldiers can now be sent into battle again, provided they are over 50% health. The Hidden Movement screen has been hidden by to popular request. Flashbangs no longer suppress through floors / roofs. Improved the pathfinding so it should reliably choose the optimal route to a location. The "Suppressed" label is no longer shown if the suppressing shot kills the affected unit. UFO doors now autoclose at the start of the turn before line of sight is updated, so you should no longer be given vision on enemies inside the UFO behind the closed doors. The camera is now locked during the enemy turn. If you're playing in a window, the camera should no longer move once you click onto another application. Weapons that are not loaded with ammo now display an empty ammo counter and their fire modes, so it's more obvious what the issue is. We now display an explanatory pop-up the first time a unit takes Stun Damage, falls unconscious, drops and objective item, and on the first night mission. There's now a visual indicator in the topbar for unconscious soldiers (so it's obvious they're not dead). Rotating towards a target is now allowed if a unit is berserking. The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now accounts for unconscious soldiers when deciding whether to automatically end the mission on successful completion. Moving items around in a soldier's inventory will no longer be free if the soldier is moving. Fixed an issue where a ring of tiles at the tops of cliffs would sometimes not appear revealed. UFO Power Core explosion on destruction is no longer quite so large. Inventory items destroyed by explosions no longer show an undamaged 3D model on the ground. Obstruction shading for neutral units like civilians is now in white rather than green. Added some new Portacabin tiles for the dockyard. Added destruction states for various terrain objects. Bugfix - fixed the annoying looping sound issue that could be triggered by hovering units. Thanks to everyone who helped us track that down! Bugfix - fixed a bug where Xenonauts outside the evacuation area could survive a mission where they were left behind. Bugfix - the Battleship UFO's hull should no longer be transparent in some circumstances. Known Bugs (which you don't need to report if encountered): There's a known memory leak in the game, which means you'll need to restart the game every couple of hours to avoid performance issues. Grenades can sometimes hit the edges of cliffs / roofs / shipping containers even when showing 100% hit chance. UFO interior is occasionally revealed in the shroud on night missions. Soldiers often contort / rotate strangely when firing weapons at very short range. The radar rings can disappear entirely when placing a new base if you scroll the Geoscape too far left or right. Blood puddles are not being hidden when you change camera level. It's not possible to crush a prop using the MARS by moving onto it, you instead have to move through it onto a free tile on the other side. The currently selected soldier will remain selected even if you end the turn and then they are killed during the alien turn. Reloading a weapon will re-order the weapon fire modes in the UI.

As we approach the end of April, it's time for our monthly update. There's been good progress in some areas this month, but also some areas of frustration. Cleaner Cells: The main new mission we've been working on this month are the Cleaner Cells. These are VIP Elimination missions where you're tasked with attacking a hidden Cleaner command post and killing / capturing the leader in charge. If you're successful, all Cleaner activity in that region will stop and Panic will stop rising there. The other part of the mission is capturing data from the various computers around the map (the same way as in the Intel Hub mission). This is an optional activity, but any data captured will increase the player's progress towards revealing the Cleaner Headquarters - and once that is revealed and destroyed, all Cleaner activity everywhere will stop. Capturing the VIP rather than killing them also provides a bonus to Cleaner HQ progress. This means these missions are another example of a mission where you can choose how much you want to push your luck. Enemy reinforcements start spawning after seven turns, so most players will have enough time to fight their way in and kill the VIP without needing to fight off the reinforcements - but you can take a risk and try to grab more of the computer data either by staying and fighting the reinforcements for a few turns, or just by spreading your team out more in the early stages of the mission. Although obviously this isn't *that* different from the Abduction missions or the Cleaner Intel Hub mission, I personally feel it still makes a nice change of pace from the standard crash site / elimination missions, so hopefully everyone else enjoys them too! Translation: The other big feature we've been working on is still the translation, which has sucked away a lot of our time and delayed pretty much everything else we've been working on. Frustratingly, it's still not done - although we're a lot closer than we were last month. I wrote out several long paragraphs of explanation here in my previous draft of this post, but honestly I won't bore you with the details. There's just a lot of work to be done to set up support across a variety of different languages (including non-Latin languages like Russian or Chinese and Japanese), and this is a big and complex game with lots of text in it. Lots of text needs to be loaded or displayed differently in very specific circumstances, so there's been a lot of unpleasant surprises. We're hoping we'll be done with our end of the translation work next week, but ultimately it's difficult to know what further problems we'll encounter. Other Work: We have done a few other things this month though. I've spent a bit of time this month adding more 'character conversations' to the game, which are a nice way to sprinkle a little more flavour into the game beyond the research text. I think they're a nice addition in terms of immersion. We changed Combat Shields back to working like they did in X1 based on all the player feedback we got on the topic. There's also been quite a lot of bugfixes and small UI updates on the strategy layer too, which are collectively useful but there's nothing individually worth picking out. That's everything for this update. I've been saying V27 is due out shortly for a while now, but we're hoping to be able to release it this week!

Hmmm. Yeah, this is something we're going to need to fix - but I imagine it's going to have to be after the Early Access launch, as we've got a proper AI overhaul planned then. We just don't have time until then. Until then you'll have to resist the temptation to cheese the whole game using smokes

No problem. I haven't actually got any new messages here or on Kickstarter that I can see though - can you double check you sent it please? I'm also reachable via email (in my sig) if that's easier.

If what you're asking for is a Steam key rather than a GOG key, sure. Just drop me a DM with some proof that you're a Kickstarter backer (or just message me on Kickstarter) and I'll send you one.

March is nearly over and it's time for our monthly update. We've still not nailed down a definite date for our Early Access launch but barring any major disaster we're planning to stick to our Q2 target window, so we're an absolute maximum of three months away from launch at this point. Campaign Options: One of the two big features we've worked on this month are campaign options, which take the form of a new panel alongside the New Campaign menu. The values for these options update as you change difficulty settings, allowing players to better understand how each difficulty setting changes the game. However, you can also change the values manually and create your own custom difficulty setting - for example, if you found the strategy layer fairly easy but wanted to make the tactical combat harder. We've also included new options (both on this panel and in the standard settings menu) that allow you to enable or disable several of the quality of life features or gameplay changes we've made in Xenonauts 2 - for example, some people like enemies displaying their heath values above their heads, whereas others do not. This also applies to things like the camera automatically focusing on newly detected enemies or whether soldier rotation when firing weapons should cost Time Units. Regular beta players should note that we've now tied some of these usability changes to difficulty level. If you're playing on the harder difficulty settings then you'll no longer see the enemy healthbars (unless you manually choose to enable them) and rotation when firing weapons does now cost Time Units by default, etc. Please bear this in mind when reporting bugs in future! Translation: The other big feature we've worked on this month is the technical implementation of translation, which has involved finding literally every text string displayed in the game and exporting it into a massive spreadsheet so it can be translated. There's many thousands of these (many of which are dynamic strings rather than static ones), so it's been a lot of work and has caused quite a few bugs. However we're now pretty close to being done with this, and we'll hopefully be doing a dry run of the tech next week with the localisation teams from our marketing partners. If that goes well then we'll be sending the text off to the professional translators afterwards. This is the main reason why I've not been comfortable setting a date for Early Access quite yet - I really wouldn't be surprised if at least one unexpected problem arises from the translation testing that derails general development for a week or more, so I don't want to be working to a hard deadline until the dry run is complete and we've fixed any major problems that were identified as a result. Other Work: Another improvement that happened this month is the Aircraft screen and all associated panels being reskinned. This was the last of the strategy management screens that required a visual revamp, so now the only parts of the game that still need a UI pass are the Geoscape map itself and the Air Combat. Quite a nice mini-milestone for us! More recently I've also been working hard on the strategy balance and trying to improve the air combat a bit. Now the campaign options are finished and hopefully translation is too, we're turning our attention back to V27 and hopefully we'll get that out about two weeks from now. That's all I've got for now - see you all next month!

The final game won't be released this year, but we're expecting to release into early access in Q2 (i.e. in the next three months). The game should be entirely playable for a good 5-10 hours in that state, although potentially lacking some polish and late-game content.

Thanks. Yeah, I think I missed this first time around. We'll take a look at the weirdness that's happening here.

Yeah. I think it is compatible, broadly speaking - but I think maybe my inability to reproduce it is caused by you having some older data in your campaign. If I try and reproduce the sequence of actions then I get a different outcome (and units take different damage etc). It's no big thing. If this is a "proper" crash that's not caused by out of date data then I imagine someone else will encounter it soon enough and hopefully we'll be able to fix it then.

Hmm. I just tried again and I still can't. Did you start this campaign in V26.3 or did it begin in an earlier version of the game?

Yeah, it's the same bug. I thought it was fixed but it's apparently not.

Yeah, this is a good point. Thanks. We should add a bit more info to this panel if the quantum decoder is around.

Thanks - this should be fixed in V27. Don't be shy about reporting this type of annoyance, it makes the game better for everyone when we get them fixed!

Yeah, many of the tactical combat bugs haven't been. The coder responsible for that has mostly been working on the tutorial and now the translation, so there's not been as much time as we'd like for bugfixes.

Thanks. Yeah, I know what this issue is. I'll get it fixed.

Hmmm. Seems to load fine for me, but I'll discuss the crash logs with the programmers and see if there's anything we can discover from them.

Hmmm. Yeah, this is a problem with the way the cabbages are set up. I'll just switch it for a different type of field.

Thanks. Yeah, this seems to affect any alien unit that doesn't have a humanoid rig. We'll hopefully be able to get it fixed for V27.

Ah, yeah. Just a little typo at my end. I'll fix that, thanks.

Thanks. This is weird; I can't seem to reproduce it even if I follow the steps in your video. We'll take a look at the logs to see if we can figure out what the problem might be.

Yeah, this is because of the bug where the strength bonuses aren't being applied correctly. Units shouldn't be getting a TU penalty when their carry weight isn't maxed out, as is happening in that screenshot. We'll re-evaluate the Colossus balance once that bug is fixed.

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

Thanks. That's weird, and the ground texture is missing too. I'll take a look.