Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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On 11/15/2025 at 12:00 PM, gG-Unknown said:
Good.
Now, Could you :
1. add a "smoke trace" (same as bullets) to the grenade moving in the air ? I know it is not realistic, but it improves visibility. Currently, Flying grenade is almost invisible. Bad for user experience. For example, TotalWar series uses smoke trace on arrows for the same reason, better visibility = better user experience.
2. Grenade louncher need to set arcs even flatter as it moves faster. If you finally used proper physics formula, then for short range arcs should looks like almost flat.
3. Use ballistic curve / arcs for MARS rockets, apply even more flat arcs than on grenade louncher.
Result is>> player will get straight line firing weapons and 3 different ballistic arcs based on speed of projectile.
THX
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.
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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!
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.
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On 11/8/2025 at 6:51 AM, Skitso said:
Not sure if this is intended, but capturing a cleaner agent doesn't generate research topic and the interrogation is conducted automatically and put in the xenopedia.
However, opening the autopsy report first in xenopedia and then returning to the geoscape, the interrogation report is displayed automatically again.
EDIT: The captured cleaner agent item is also left in the storeroom and is not flagged as a junk that is sold with the sell junk action.
The interrogation being autocomplete is intentional, but I'll fix the issue with the item not being flagged as junk.
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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!
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).
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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:
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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.
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14 hours ago, Bilton said:
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?
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9 minutes ago, Skitso said:
Shot path goes around the corner like in X1. Maximum that should be ok is directly down from the corner, but that shot path goes right from the corner.
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.
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On 11/8/2025 at 7:50 AM, Skitso said:
This shot shouldn't be possible. (The Cleaner shot my unit dead there.)
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.
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10 hours ago, Nodrak said:
Update: This bug is critical; It cannot be recovered from unless you have a save that ends up without a base attack with Airborne soldiers OR you complete the Base Defense with ALL airborne soldiers, and then abort the Skyranger mission. (Which may result in other unrecoverable states).
Details: I replayed the base mission with the default assignments. Base was defended in 1 turn and took no damage. 7/8 of the default assignments were Airborne soldiers, all 7 were unassigned from the Skyranger 'correctly'. I manually 'curated' the equipment to prevent issues with Items on the Skyranger be assigned to non-airborne soldiers via some internal priority list. Essentially, doing everything I can to make sure all back end instance references would be maintained. The 7/8 soldiers was unforeseen at the time but fortunate; the 8th soldier was still assigned to 'Airborne' but was also missing from the Skyranger! This soldier is permanently bugged, and will likely crash the game any time it or its equipment is referenced going forward.
- Defending a base will clear ALL soldiers from the Skyranger regardless if they took part in the mission.
- Soldiers that did take part in the mission will return to the base 'correctly'.
- Soldiers that did not take part in the mission, will bug out and cannot be recovered even if the Skyranger aborts and returns home.
This bug alone will prevent any Iron Man attempts.
bug_report_2025-11-09-16h43_lo_6.21.0_unhandled_exception_0.zip
Thanks. We'll look into this - we appreciate the detailed bug report!
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5 hours ago, chacineiro said:
Sure, what happened was: I clicked to launch it on the geoscape, equipped the squad, then clicked to launch the operation on the armory, standard stuff, but then the game brought me back to the Geoscape and nothing happened and then I was unable to launch it again, nothing would happen if I clicked on the launch operation button. Then I saved, loaded the file, launched the operation from the geoscape, did the whole squad equipping again, and then it worked normally.
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.
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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.
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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!
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.
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This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
This update 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.
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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!
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On 11/1/2025 at 9:07 AM, Skitso said:
Great changes overall and good to see the launch of MS6 closing up finally.
About the quoted items above:
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Laser cost: FINALLY! Thanks. I've been asking for this like 2 years
- Return from mind control nerf: Not a fan. Mind control is quite rare and breaking out of it having no negatives seem odd. On the contrary, unit should be suppressed, stunned or even panic recovering from such an intrusive attack.
- Alien base crew: Same as my thoughts on Cleaner HQ, these permanent missions, where player can choose when to tackle them and usually use their optimal crew with best equipment while running the mission in a slow, careful and methodical way as there is also no turn restrictions, often feel too easy. Map design where threat is often approaching from one or two fronts make them even easier. As before, I need to play MS6 stable to get a better feel of this, but at least all previous versions had this problem.
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.
On 11/1/2025 at 9:43 AM, gG-Unknown said:Yes.
Scaling a skill among the oponent type, and more difference between opnents type is welcome.
Would you look at Androns and Towers ?
- Towers recently start to move, but keep them slow please, should be the slowest opponents TU: 30
- Then Androns TU 40 are basically Battle versions of towers. ( Intentional idea > slow Androns with high armour are hard to shoot down, but perfect target for melee ambush with electric baton)
We need some opponents on the list who use also low scale stats. Currently all opponents use above average TU (55+) which somewhat suppress meaning of word "average"
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.
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Laser cost: FINALLY! Thanks. I've been asking for this like 2 years
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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!
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Various changes made to the UOO Sabotage mission:
- Increased the reinforcement timer by 2 turns.
- Fewer of the enemies have Fusion weapons.
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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.
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23 hours ago, chacineiro said:
Happened to me quite a few times, I intercepted a lone UFO or escorted UFO, auto-resolved it, got a failure message but all my aircraft got out alive. When I accepted this result(mainly due to distraction, thinking it was sucessful since my aircraft survived) the game would respawn that same UFO(always without the escorts) somewhere near the interception point, and my aircraft would be just fine, in the same location but damaged due to the previous battle. The same thing happened when I tried to intercept an observer but the god damn thing escaped in the air battle minigame, It respawned in a nearby location, instead of staying in the same place when I got back to the geoscape.
BTW, its not just an observer UFO thing(because it could very well end in a failed interception even if I got out alive) it happened with scouts and destroyers also.
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.
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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!
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.
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On 10/18/2025 at 10:48 AM, gG-Unknown said:
Well, I made some searching for your previous statements :
In April your aim was release before end of this year. It means to hit Christmass season, ideal release would be mid November. Now in mid October is clear that release 1.0 would be on next April at the best. So yes, my statement that Goldhawk struggle to deliver content is valid.
Anyway, the point of my suggestion was, when development of new content takes long, you could spend few man-days for ground combat balance and ground combat mini-projects. Combat balancing need iterations anyway, players need time to develop meta and possible holes in ruleset. I am pointing out, that ratio of time invested into aircombat and strategic map this year of development ,was ginormous compared to ground combat.
The list of items I provided above are just top pressing. Also there are another list of old time issues you unfortunately buried - shot gun range, shotgun dmg type, On-Off cammo, alien grenades pickable and equipable in armoury, colour tapes on soldier uniforms, too large smoke, smoke properly interfere with gas&enviroment ... . People would come to play Xeno2 for ground combat as the main reason, so I guess you would like polish it as much as possible.
Oh and here is one idea on top, how to soften Power fist to make it fit the lore :
Colossus is described as barely movable suit, but melee combat need speed and agility which do not fit. So, solution for Power fist : Make it work as a hydraulic / pneumatic piston, which punches (release) than self auto-reload. (no ammo needed, it takes energy of suit to compress then release piston) It means his melee power is not based on speed, rather brute force. As result, the power fist can be used only once per round, as it takes time to auto-reload self. TU consumption is same as for baton. Add unigue sound of releasing air off the pneumatic piston when used .
Thanks again for re - re - consider your time budget towards ground combat polishing.
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.
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54 minutes ago, Skitso said:
Really? Didn't it get pushed back from the end of phase 1 to the beginning of phase 2?
Edit: yeah, I checked, it was day 79 in MS5.
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?
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6 hours ago, Skitso said:
I've obviously not played 6.17 yet, so I might be completely wrong, but at least in earlier versions the Cleaner HQ mission felt anticlimatic in how easy it was compared to many missions preceding it. Making the mission tougher has been on my wish list for ages. Even my friend who played the game for the first time ever commented how easy the HQ mission was (MS5). I see the Cleaner HQ mission as the first "boss mission" where the game should really test the players skills and show that is is not Firaxis walk in the park kids game. Make the easier difficulties as easy as they need to be, but please don't make veteran/commander too easy.
(And I need to empahisise again, I might be completely wrong here as I haven't played few of the latest experimental versions!)
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.
4 hours ago, gG-Unknown said:Chriss,
I see your team strugle to deliver content. From player point of view, M6 is weak. At the moment, I do not see enough reasons to start a new campaign.
Would you please focus to ground combat balance ? / Are the fallowing fixies and improvement for M6 on your list ?
- Grenade louncher (crazy miss chance landing, occasional unpredictable landing - it can even shoot backwards !!! , wrong default aim method direct vs indirect, dmg of later grenades is weak)
- Satchel charge with trigger mechanic - now It is wasted opportunity for fun gameplay ! (add improved versions, limited ability to throw for 5 tiles, reduced weight to 8, increased blast radius, increased dmg)
- Demolition pack - increase weight to 7
- Add ability to carry stuff for Colossus (bodies, ammo, nades, consumables) so it work as a supporting mule for the team.
- Add ability to use Colossus as cover (by others) so it works as a support for the team.
- Add bonus for light_amour / no_armour for grenade range throw plus two tiles (light armour is still not used, add range would create an opportunity for lightly armoured grenade thrower class)
Thanks
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.
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On 10/15/2025 at 9:34 PM, Alan Griffith said:
In the Base Army (and launch screen for dropships), dragging the shield into the backpack of any soldier always fail, and right-clicking it in the equipment list gives the message "No valid placement location" (so it's not just a matter of the grid being difficult to line up).
I can place a shield in the primary weapon slot for any soldier (not just those I designate as 'shield' who get it automatically), but not in the backpack, regardless of whether there is a shield in that soldier's primary slot or not.
It is possible this is a feature/change rather than a bug, but I cannot find anything in the patch notes about it (and the tooltip for shield still lists "Slot: primary, container, ground" , so if it is an intended change then the tooltip needs updating to remove 'container').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.
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On 10/14/2025 at 6:10 PM, chacineiro said:
Thanks, that annoying CTD is fixed, there just a small "freeze" now when you hover a weapon, maybe you guys want to take a look at that in the future...
Thanks. Yeah, you're right, there's a noticeable framedrop as the tooltip is spawned now. We'll take a look at that next week.
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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!
Although we're approaching the public release of Milestone 6, we're not going to hit our target of releasing it this week. There's still a number of issues of varying severity we need to clear first, as we want to ensure the basic release is (reasonably) polished. Hopefully it won't be too long, but there's a couple of potentially quite thorny issues that may delay things if they take a while to fix.
Balance Changes:
- Cleaner base mission made a little easier as it was quite tough for when it appeared. Fewer of the Cleaner Soldiers now have body armour, and the Cleaners with Accelerated Rifles are now less likely to use them in burst fire mode (previously even a single Cleaner could have massive damage output if RNG was in their favour; it's now a little more predictable).
- Enemy Sentry Guns are now able to move.
- Fire arc of missiles in the aerial combat has been reduced from 180 degrees to 150 degrees.
Changes:
- Tactical: added a new 3D model for the variant of the Cleaner Soldier with body armour, so there's a visual distinction between the normal and armoured ones.
- Tactical: added a new melee animation for the Colossus.
- Tactical: fixed several issues with the Sebillian grenade throw animation, and slightly improved the Sebillian runcycle and Andron fire animations. Sped up the MARS move animation a bit.
- Tactical: some more tile fixes / improvements for the Soviet Town biome.
- Air Combat: clicking and dragging the background to move the camera no longer counts as a click (so it won't change the target / move destination of the selected plane).
- Air Combat: the current formation becomes deselected when you move a plane, allowing you to press the button again to reset your planes into their original positions.
Bugfixes:
- (Hopefully) fixed a crash that could occur after killing a Cyberdrone.
- Fixed a hang that would occur if you pressed the Abort Launch button on the dropship screen while the "select soldiers" panel is active.
- Fixed there being black ground tiles around the dropship in certain types of missions (e.g. Ambush missions).
- Fixed local AI soldiers moving one tile at a time during the AI turn.
- Fixed the MARS / ARES not correctly despawning after being destroyed.
- Fixed the pathing system trying to path soldiers through the solid side walls of the blast doors on ATLAS / Cleaner Base missions.
- Further tutorial fixes to ensure none of the Cleaner soldiers get stuck trying to move to their intended positions in the tactical section of the tutorial.
- Fixed some unrevealed tiles and map edges on the ambush maps.
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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!
We're not expecting to add any additional content to Milestone 6 at this point, and we're hoping to release this onto the public branch towards the end of this week (assuming we can fix the remaining bugs we're working through, and not too many more bugs are encountered). So please do let us know if you encounter any serious problems while playing!
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a crash that would occur if you hovered over a weapon tile in the tactical combat (i.e. when the weapon tooltip would spawn).
- Fixed aliens with burst fire weapons (Servitors, Cyberdrones, Sebillians, etc) being unable to attack.
- Fixed the tutorial getting stuck in the air combat interception section due to the afterburners toggle not working correctly.
- Fixed a number of outdated text strings (such as the Agent Interrogation stating that it provides +150 OP, rather than +50).
Vx6 (6.23.0) - Ground Combat] Accuracy is not working as intended or expected
in Xenonauts-2 Bug Reports
Posted
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:
Mechanical Issues:
Conclusions: