Chris

Thanks. Yeah, that's a bug. We'll look into it tomorrow.

Hmmm. I guess I'll move the tooltips to the Psyons then, and pretend it's an aura ability.

Nope. We'll be fixing that on Monday.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! We're planning to release Milestone 2 onto the standard branches next week. If all goes well this may be the final Experimental build for Milestone 2, so please give it a test and let us know if you encounter any issues! This update breaks save games so if you want to keep playing 2.10, please do so on the Experimental Legacy branch. Balance / Gameplay Changes: Convoy Ambush and Extract VIP tactical missions now support all potential biomes, rather than always using a fixed map. We've therefore added 12 new maps to the game to allow this. Added research text to the Mantid Interrogation and the Wraith Interrogation. This means all research projects now have research text (although I need to do a quick second pass on a handful more before I call this work totally done). Updated the stats of various aliens to better match their lore: Reapers now have 70TU (from 60) and 75 Reflexes (from 50). They were previously quite weak, but let us know if this makes them overpowered. Sebillian Bravery increased to 70 (from 50). Wraith Strength reduced to 55 (from 60) and Bravery increased to 60 (from 50). The game now displays "Game Loss" as a failure effect on the initial ATLAS Base Reclaim mission. You can no longer access the VIP's inventory on the VIP rescue missions. Revised some of the objective text lines (that appear in the bottom left of the Geoscape) to reflect changes to the research tree. Aircraft screen now has tooltips for the Weight Capacity and Hardpoint Capacity. Beards should no longer disappear when you equip the heavy armour on soldiers. Fixed some issues with the dockyard warehouse rollerdoor being able to get into a broken state once opened. Fixed the petrol station columns still being 100% blocking in their destroyed states. Park trellises no longer block vision, as they're clearly transparent. Fixed a typo on the Xenonaut base defence mission briefing. Time estimates for research / engineering projects that are not in progress should now always be consistent, as previously they could change by up to an hour (depending if you were closer to the start or end of the current hour). Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where soldiers that have been removed from dropship (due to injury or being MIA on a mission) are added back in with a broken loadout (this could cause crashes in some circumstances). Fixed an issue where the game would fail to boot for people using the save game folder directory override. Fixed some Landed UFOs never taking off again. Fixed the Ammo Recharge upgrade for the Lasers leaving them with no ammo. Fixed an issue where a soldier caught in multiple simultaneous explosions (e.g. several vehicles chain-exploding) would sometimes only suffer damage from one of them. Fixed surviving soldiers being labelled as "Wounded" rather than "Survived", and not showing a recovery time. Fixed smoke tiles being visually duplicated (so looking much thicker) after loading a saved game. Fixed the sorted column header still being selected on the Soldier screen when you leave the screen and re-enter. Fixed the mods panel buttons all generating unnecessary popups. Updated the weight icon on the Aircraft loadout screen to be correct.

Milestone 3 is due in February, which contains Crusier UFOs and actually unlocks quite a lot of the items on the roadmap. I think that'll feel like another pretty major content drop for the community. Milestone 4 (Harvester UFO) is roughly scheduled two months later, and Milestone 5 (Battleship & ENDGAME) is two months after that. At that point the game should be content complete, but we'll likely need another couple of months for localisation work and any final bugfixes. So I reckon we've got about 9 months of work left on the game? But those are only rough estimates. Maybe if things go really well we can squash Milestone 4 and 5 together into a single release and shave off a couple of months, but usually our deadlines end up slipping the other way!

That does look a bit like a Z, yeah. But it's just coincidence - it's just line detailing on the tank, similar to the Xs on the boxes above. As you say, we'd absolutely not accept having Zs painted deliberately on our tanks given the current meaning of the symbol. The video you see shows the tank at a different angle, and the sprites are a unique paintover in each angle so I think if you manage to find a video from 2012 showing the tank facing the same way you'll see the Zs are present there too (or if you're on the community edition you can just look in the game files to check). Plus the artist that painted them was Romanian, and despite being used in some Soviet Maps that vehicle is actually an American Bradley so it'd be weird if the artist drew Zs on that rather than the T-80 sprites we also have in the game.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Although we'll likely be releasing a few hotfixes this week and adding in a little more art and research text, I'm hoping this is the last major update for Milestone 2 before we release it onto the main Steam / GOG / Epic branches. Balance / Gameplay Changes: Research tree updates: Cleaner Agent Autopsy (new artwork) Cleaner Soldier Interrogation (text finalised) Cleaner Agent Interrogation (text finalised) Sebillian Interrogation (text finalised) Psyon Interrogation (text finalised) Reaper Interrogation (text first draft) The UFO health balancing system that would occur based on the number of aircraft in your squadron has now been disabled, as it seems too easy to exploit. Let us know if that causes any major spikes in the air combat difficulty! If you have multiple soldiers selected on the Soldier screen, clicking either the Loadout dropdown or Role dropdown will attempt to assign the new value to all selected soldiers. Updated the aircraft weapon tooltips, and fixed most of those tooltips incorrectly displaying 0 for the weapon's Ammo Capacity. Cleaner Agent Interrogation now correctly unlocks when you capture a Cleaner Agent (previously it was unlocking off the Cleaner Soldiers). Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur at the end of a tactical mission. Fixed a crash that could occur after completing the Rescue Soldiers tactical mission. Fixed a crash that would occur on the Eliminate VIP missions due to the VIP not spawning correctly. Hopefully fixed the issue where grenades / medikits would show 0% hit chance and become unusable (this would occur after using the move-shoot preview mode). Fixed a bug where the new autoresolve weapon damage balancing was also being applied in manual air combat, which caused certain alien weapons to inflict enormously reduced damage on your interceptors. Fixed an issue where the Cyberdrone frontal shield was not correctly being destroyed by explosives. Attempted another fix for shooting through adjacent crouched friendly soldiers not working sometimes. Fixed a bug where you could go overcapacity when hiring scientists / engineers if you had space free at a different base. Added a bit more logging to try and catch the rare crash that sometimes occurs when exiting the Soldier Equip screen.

I'm glad you're enjoying it - though playing Ironman on the Experimental branch is pretty risky given how buggy these builds can be! The economy balance is something that we'll continue to tweak based on player feedback, but yes it's possible that the escort UFOs are a bit too strong right now. However it does sound like you're pretty well equipped with interceptors given the stage of the game you're at. There's 200 days before the game cuts out right now (and probably around 300 in a full campaign once the game is complete) so it's hard to say whether you're pacing yourself correctly; ultimately the game has a lot of moving parts and there should be more than one viable strategy to win the game. You'll have to let me know in a few days how the campaign worked out for you

Hello! If you have Milestone 1.33 on Epic then you have the same version as is available on Steam and GOG. Unfortunately the Epic Store doesn't support Experimental branches like on Steam / GOG, so the test versions of Milestone 2 that are available on Steam / GOG are not available yet. However Milestone 2 should be complete next week and released on all the standard branches. When this happens we'll release it on the Epic store too!

Thanks. It actually is a bug - it was unlocking off a captured Cleaner Soldier rather than an Agent, which I'll fix now.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This build breaks save games, so you'll need to start a new campaign. If anyone wants to continue your current campaign, I've switched 2.08d to the Experimental Legacy branch and you can switch over if you want to keep playing that version. Gameplay & Balance Changes: Strategy: Updates to the research tree: Split out the Cleaner Interrogation research into seperate Cleaner Agent and Cleaner Soldier interrogation projects Cleaner Agent Interrogation has new artwork / text Cleaner Soldier Interrogation has new artwork / text Xenobiology has updated artwork / text General Interrogation has updated text Probe UFO has updated text Fighter UFO has updated artwork Fusion Explosives has updated text Minor styling updates to the Aircraft screen on the new UI elements added in Milestone 2 (Weight / Hardpoints) Cash can now go negative on the strategy layer due to upkeep / wage costs Reduced weight of the Stun Gun battery to match that of pistol ammo Added unique artwork for all the different Gauss weapon ammo magazines Advanced LMG weapons now have 2x1 ammo magazines, like the basic LMG does Added the art for the HEVY Alenium Rounds Phantom equipment slots now placed along the bottom of the screen (to match the Angel) Air Combat: The damage inflicted by UFO weapons in air combat (both manual and autoresolve) is now modified by the difficulty setting, ranging from 80% of normal on Recruit up to 120% of normal on Commander. When autoresolving air combat, certain weapons now inflict reduced damage against targets that can do an evasive roll manuever. For players this mostly affects Torpedoes, which have zero autoresolve strength against enemies that can roll. However most alien weapons that can be dodged using evasive roll also now do reduced damage in the autoresolve calculation. Updated the UFO Hunter Killer missiles to have a visually larger projectile Tactical Combat: We've made some AI updates to make civilians less suicidal Secton Psionic Triangulation now triggers off nearby Psyons, not other nearby Sectons. This makes the first mission vs aliens less dangerous. Cleaners have had several stats reduced, as their statlines were a bit too high compared to the early-game aliens. All Cleaners have suffered -5 Accuracy, -10 Time Units, -10 Strength and -10 Reflexes. Added some additional map variants for the Cleaner Data Raid mission, and also added some internal randomision to the building on those maps. Rescue Soldiers mission now draws from the entire pool of Raid maps, not one single Polar map. If you don't have enough space in the dropship to rescue the soldiers in Rescue Soldier missions, the game is now a bit smarter about who it recovers: Firstly, rescued soldiers can now fit into slots in the dropship vacated by KIA soldiers who failed their post-battle survival roll If there's still not enough space to bring back the rescued soldiers, the game will now always prefer living soldiers (so if you want to recover one soldier in particular, you can shoot the others). Fixed some tall props that incorrectly had 30% Stopping Chance, which should have been 50% Updated Abduction Tubes to be worth 2 Alloys (from 0), and updated the briefing accordingly. Camera Rotate buttons are no longer reversed, and now show the correct keyboard shortcut keybinds on the tooltip Fixed the click hitbox on the "Visible Enemy" head icons being too large. Pressing C when a unit is in motion will correctly queue up a crouch icon (as if you clicked the Crouch button) The orange TU reserve overlay is now shown on the soldier minitabs at the top of the screen when TU are being reserved by a soldier. Updated the human Pistol animations, making it more obvious that the unit is armed with a pistol Bugfixes: Fixed a Geoscape crash linked to upgrading items in the workshop Fixed jetpack 3d models not displaying in tactical combat Fixed the Exosuit heavy armour variant looking like Tactical Armour in combat Fixed The General displaying like a civilian in the first mission Fixed hair clipping through helmets for Unassigned soldiers Fixed some UFO walls on certain variants of the Destroyer / Observer / Abductor being indestructible Fixed aliens spawning within UFO walls on some of the new Dockyard crashsite maps Fixed some wall tiles being invisible in the Xenonaut base defence Medical Room Fixed the generators in the Xenonaut base defence Generator Room not allowing units to path through them once destroyed Fixed some missing shelf ends on the dockyard VIP Elimination missions Fixed you getting duplicate soldier hotkey numbers if you already had soldiers assigned to keys 7-9 when you go on the Soldier Rescue mission Fixed the human Combat Shield jetpack animations so the shield doesn't clip through the body at a 90-degree angle when in flight Fixed the combat shield clipping through the ground if dropped on the floor

Every major new milestone release will break save games - but even if we update the game, the previous Milestone build will be on our Legacy branches. So you’ll always be able to finish your playthrough, but once you’ve begun you won’t be able to experience any of the new content without starting a new campaign.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Another small hotfix for 2.08 to address another crash bug. Bugfixes: Fixed the game crashing on after a tactical mission if a soldier had suffered enough damage to be wounded, but was not killed. Fixed red debug error text flashing up every time a crouching soldier was given a move order.

Yeah. I don't actually think it's very realistic, because shooting up / down at people mostly makes the intervening objects more or less of a problem rather making the actual target easier or harder to hit - but ultimately you're not the only person who thinks the game doesn't model height levels in the shooting calculation, so the current system probably isn't the best choice.

As in a 10% per height level penalty to hit chance when shooting upward at units on higher levels?

Thanks! I'll get to work on fixing some of those issues shortly

I would imagine so, yeah, as I think that's treated the same as a normal combat death - but if you see it happen again then please report it as a bug!

I didn't call you an idiot. Please can you show me where we've fixed the same bug six times?

Shooting from a higher level already reduces the cover offered by cover on the lower floor. I believe it's reduced by 20% for each height level. Unfortunately the LOS-based cover you're talking about isn't possible in our game, because it's not a game where we map shot accuracy based on the size of 3d models - we use an abstracted tile-based system where objects and actors use a % stopping chance for any projectile passing through their tile, even if you can only see / shoot part of that tile. We briefly experimented with a system like is used in Phoenix Point which would allow the behaviour you're after, but ultimately we didn't think it was a great match for a tactical game because hit chances vary wildly with even small changes in unit position (which causes various negative effects for the player).

It's now the end of October and time for our regular Xenonauts 2 development update. Here's what the development team has been busy with this month! Milestone 2: Our main focus this month has been Milestone 2, which is undergoing testing on the Experimental branches. This is now feature complete - we're concentrating on bugfixes and balance changes while we wait for a few more maps / art assets / research texts to be completed. We're expecting to be able to release it onto the default Steam / GOG branches a couple of weeks from now, about halfway through November. Milestone 2 contains a lot of updates, including several new types of tactical mission, a new UFO type, and some significant changes to the early part of the campaign to expand the role of the Cleaners (there's more details about this in our previous development update). Air Combat Rebalance: One thing worth mentioning in more detail is our rework of the air combat. We've implemented a more freeform equipment system for Xenonaut aircraft and then rebalanced the air combat itself so it rewards skillfully maneuvering your aircraft in a similar way to the original Xenonauts, while also trying to remove a few of the more abusable tactics (e.g. it's no longer possible to continually use evasive roll to circle-strafe around an enemy). This means the overall balancing pass has touched almost every part of air combat. We've tried to create distinct identities for all the different types of weapons you can fit on your interceptors, make the different UFOs pose different challenges to the player, and added some new UFO weapons and aircraft equipment to increase variety. Of course, many people prefer to simply autoresolve the air combat - and this is one of the ongoing balance issues we're aware of in Milestone 2. Making the game playable for people who only use autoresolve has led to the air combat being a little too easy for people who use only manual autoresolve, so we're going to be working to fix that over the next week or two. AI Improvements: We've also started upgrading the AI this month. We begun by focusing on the civilian AI, as they currently don't behave in a very realistic way - as MANY players have noticed! I'm not sure if we'll have a patch ready for Milestone 2, but if not then we should have noticeable improvements in place for Milestone 3. Additionally, many of the issues we've found with the civilian AI were caused by problems with the general AI model - which means fixing them will make the aliens a bit smarter too! Loading Times & Unity Upgrade: Another thing we've been actively working on is improving loading times, with the eventual goal of reducing load times by roughly 50%. The good news is that we're making steady progress here, but the bad news is that players are unlikely to see any improvements until Milestone 3. This month we experimented with stripping some further data out of our saved game format and found this sped up loading times by 25%-30% on our current (very outdated) version of Unity. However, when we tested this change in a more modern version of Unity, we found something interesting: load times were sped up by 25%-30% even if we disabled our change. It turns out recent versions of Unity have optimised that part of their loading process already. As upgrading Unity will also bring a lot of other improvements to the game (e.g. better performance, proper support for borderless window mode, etc), we're planning to do that as part of our plans for Milestone 3. In the meantime, we're working on multithreading as a way to deliver the remaining ~25% loading time reduction. Conclusion: Although there's plenty of smaller things I could talk about, I'll end things here. I think we've had a productive month overall, and personally I've particularly enjoyed seeing progress towards fixing some of the largest remaining problems raised by players at launch (slow loading times, bad civilian AI, the air combat needing more work). As always, thanks for reading - I'll write another post next month!

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This is a small stability patch for Milestone 2.08 that should fix several of the most serious bugs in the game. We'll be releasing 2.09 later this week which should include more content. Balance / Gameplay Changes: The Exosuit armour now has a "Heavy Armour" visual variant. The Observer no longer incorrectly has 1 HP, and is now back to 300 HP. Stun Gun is no longer a starting item, and is now unlocked from Xenobiology. Slightly updated the construction cost and sell prices of all manufactured soldier weapons. Shotguns and Rifles are now slightly cheaper, Gauss weapons are more expensive, and Lasers & Gauss weapons have higher starting sale prices. Bugfixes: Fixed the game crashing on construction of a MARS or other vehicle. Fixed a crash that could occur on completion on a tactical mission if a soldier / vehicle had been killed in the battle. Fixed a crash that could occur engaging an Observer in air combat. Fixed an issue where soldiers could appear with no visible armour / body once they'd be unassigned from the dropship. Fixed melee weapons not properly pathing to the target any more.

This is anecdotal evidence based on spending the best part of 15 years developing these two games. There's always been a strong divide between people who like the manual air combat and people who would rather not engage with it, even back with Xenonauts 1. I don't think anything has changed with X2 in that regard.

The data is all anecdotal, but that's certainly the impression I get based on player feedback. The air combat is a potential selling point for players but given the Xenonauts franchise is arguably the only decent X-Com spiritual successor that remains faithful to the original formula (OpenXcom is great but not a spiritual successor, while XCOM is great but not faithful), there's plenty of reasons why people might be interested in X2 but not care about the air combat. Mechanically it's quite different from the rest of the game. We'll probably look into a damage modifier for UFO weapons in the next week or two.

A large portion of the playerbase uses autoresolve, I'd guess probably more than actually play the air combat manually. The game balance does need to account for autoresolve otherwise we'll run into major issues. Have you actually played the new values though? The updates mostly make the air combat more forgiving if you get things wrong, whereas I suspect most skilled players are able to position their aircraft so they don't actually get hit very often (which the autoresolve doesn't do) so it probably won't affect them a great deal - whereas a change like reducing the HP of UFOs would affect all players equally. Yes, we could add difficulty settings for the air combat as well if people want. There's currently no difficulty scaling on the air combat at all so that's probably part of the issue here. I suspect adding damage scaling to the weapons based on difficulty wouldn't cause too many problems, especially on Commander where there's no autoresolve functionality to worry about at all.

Lots of people were complaining the game air game was now way too hard, especially for people playing using autoresolve. Looks like you're on the Prototype branches still. I've disabled those, as we're not using them any more - you need to switch back to Experimental. Sorry, yeah - I've fixed this now. It affected both versions of the game, it was a bug.