Xeroxth

Of course I agree wholeheartedly. Combat drugs will eventually kill your troops through overuse. But in exchange it makes you more powerful in only 1-2 turns when you’re desperate.

I've been thinking about alien dissections and how in the early access only give you a flat profit by selling them living or dead. Maybe there should be tech trees allowing you to derrive combat drugs from alien corpses that give your soldiers slight temporary bonuses. At the start some of the drugs can be pretty mundane like painkillers (increase morale temporary) and adrenaline (give 10 to 20 emergency APs). But as the alien war drags on new research into alien biology can give soldiers drugs that let them partly mimic some of the alien powers. For instance regenerative shots made from sebilians that give you a slow regen at the end of every turn if you left 20 APs. Stealth serum which allows a soldier to be immune to alien overwatch for a single turn but deplete their APs for 1 next turn. Or vision enhancers derrived from mantid venom which improves your range by 50% but will reduce it for 2 turns after. Of course this will take into account addiction that will heavily impact your troops in the long run and even kill them outright due to overdose. However if the player chooses they can turn their xenonauts into drug crazed monsters to fight against the alien menace. This will definitely sour relations with certain powers that fund your efforts.

Oh yeah having cleaners actually taking over countries that are destabilized to set up footholds for the aliens in africa, latin america and asia would make a lot of sense. Wouldn't surprised me in the slightest that cleaners would take over widely condemned countries like apartheid africa since they actually had nukes.

Yeah it kinda sucky that we may never see one of the coolest parts of xenonauts ever again. I get why you are frustrated being founder but insulting people for asking is not fruitful to any discusssion. Seriously.

Oh definitely. I would love for an alien vehicle to destroy. And I think I speak for a lot of people in the forums considering we have a thread on3x3 vehicles on a weekly basis.

All of these ideas are great and actually could be a new type of on site missions. Actually defending these off site areas against alien attacks would be great. SAM sites would give an in game reason for how the cleaners stuck around after you kill their main base. Helping the aliens destroy SAM sites allowing them the ability to fly with impunity. While radar towers can be attacked with you needing to station some troops with left over equipment. Probably each bases can have 4 sub radar towers.

Yeah that is the one change that perplexing me as well. For some reason smoke grenades can stun now. Instead of actually having sleep gas grenades we have this boring middle ground that makes no sense. Smoke grenades can’t stun irl.

Eh from what I’ve gathered from what stated by Chris when I asked this recently. It’s not actually impossible but more about being extremely difficult for pathfinding to calculate the movement of a multi tile enemy or your own unit. The first game also had this issue but it wasn’t very pronounced due to the tanks being able to crush everything except for hedgewalls and the UFOs. Chris said it’s preferable to just rebalance the current MARS which simply sucks hard and serve like a bargain bin heavy weapons guy that costs way too much, can be killed by even clearners and way too inaccurate to actually do fire support.

But by the time you actually caught a cleaner and disect them you immediately realize that they are everything but normal with cybernetic implants and some with parts of their brains remove to be controlled directly or communicate with the psyonic aliens better.

Currently the early access has been great but there's a huge minor issue that keeps irking me. That is the fact that soft covers like hay, bushes and hedges can block bullets completely. The rest of the game has been immersive but I can't for the life of me focus when bushes and such can create a 100% block chance for bullets and even stuff like alien plasma. It just doesn't make any sense. Maybe a way to fix this is to give bushes and other folliage only a vision block or lower damage if the projectile hits it. Another weird jankyness we seem to have now is the fact that whenever you toggle between different height levels the soldiers on levels on top like on the roof or containers still clearly visible and some times over lapping onto lower levels. Making it extremely confusing when unless at the right level you can mistake to true position of your troops. Is there a way to make the upper levels partly translucent when toggling or making soldiers of upper levels disappear completely unless on their level. Because the half baked viewing we have now is just really bad. Even worse in later stages of the game with multi level ships or maps with big buildings.

I really don’t think that would be workable at all. But one thing I think there’s ton of potential with factions especially in a setting where the cold war continues into modern day is actually giving the choice for your xenonauts to do optional missions for the warsaw pact and nato to improve relations with them (while also reducing terror). This of course will also give the boon of being able to use their equipment and doing joint research with the factions to create faction exclusive technologies. At one point you can choose to side with one faction or another, staying neutral, or killing both sides to take over the world for yourself. Either way it would unite the entire world against the alien threat.

First of all is increasing their AP to at least 80 and maybe even 100. There should be more reaper variants as well. Maybe armored, stealth and brood beast variants. The armored reapers has the current AP making it more lumbering but capable of shrugging off ballistic weapons, vulnerable to laser and other energy weapons. The stealth one is basically the wraith but melee but way more squishy than the average reaper. The brood beast can create special explosive bloated zombies that spawn 2 to 3 reapers at once.

More enemy varieties would be very much welcome. The 3 floating enemies added in early access now is great. But even back during the beta I was already suggesting more types of weird (even non humanoid) alien auxiliaries to make it more interesting. One simple addition would be a 4 armed radial symmetric alien that basically have no need for facing at all. Which means they can overwatch at any sides, making flanking maneuvers impossible. Another idea are aliens with multiple stages. Maybe a type of alien that starts out as a regular soldier in a containment suit that if broken can turn into a melee monster with a toxic radiation cloud. Other types can be silicon based aliens that are essentially living crystals that is completely immune to lasers, being able to not only deflect beam weapons but can also shoot a power sweaping weapon that can hit multiple targets in a cone. The trade off is ballistic weapons are deadly to them. What the most needed as of now is sniper specialist and explosive specialist aliens. The sniper can be a slug like alien that is extremely slow and squishy but can kill your soldiers from extreme distances. While the explosive alien auxiliary can be a centaur type beast that carry a rocket launcher on its back.

I very much agree with this idea, having both would be very nice. Especially with the current balance in which the MARS basically became irrelevant by the time the mantids and sebillians roll around. Having a tank to tip the scale the moment anti gravity tech is complete would make the addition of more dangerous aliens in the future late game much more bearable.

I think it’s underpowered actually. That’s why I said they serve me better as a bulldozer and demolition vehicle than anything else. They’re basically a soldier with machine gun and grenade launcher but way more expensive, can’t level up and only marginally less squishy. Speaking of which I don’t think anyone were complaining about big unwieldy vehicles in Xenonauts 1 and stuff like Phoenix Point. On the opposite most people seeing an armored car barreling through buildings and killing everything in exchange for taking 4 soldier slots as great.

Very much agree with this. Cleaners in the lore were capable of actually changing history and major politics entirely (they assassinated Gorbachev and kept the cold war going into the 21th century). This is why I think cleaners should be given advanced alien plasma weapons from the start with all of them being cybernetically enhanced making them way more threatening. Maybe having missions of evacuating VIPs or killing cleaners backed leaders should be a thing. Maybe mission where you have to protect Nuclear silos from being attacked by cleaners. One part I would like to see is expanding on how grotesque the cleaners are underneath their human exterior with grafted alien organs and cybernetic limbs.

Hi it’s been a time since I’ve returned to the forums but I’ve asked this before back in 2019. With early access my opinion has not changed. The current unmanned tank is really, really unbalanced for levels with them basically serving as a glorified bulldozer cleaning up walls without my soldiers having to waste APs throwing demolishing charges or shooting the cover out. Not only that they’re no different from a soldier with heavy grenade launchers but worse. I think back in Xenonauts 1 tanks were a lot more balanced having their size being the hindrance to their fire power. Are there still be any plans to rebalance the current tanks or add new multi tile tanks and aliens?

Ooh I like the idea. If you can't implement this well may I suggest the alien base attack missions to have two parts as well. One part on the surface where your team fight your way through alien turrets and patrols to enter the base proper. The second part is the already implemented underground base raid. A good way of implementing this is without breaking the in game lore too much is to mention that the Alien Mothership is actually built as a gigantic natural habitat of the alien home planet. And before attacking the main power generator on the ship, the Xenonauts has to get through the habitat domes. Drawing some inspiration from the game Prey from 2006.

I think the morale and stress system should have a longer term of consequences than just limiting the frequency of combat for each soldier. Maybe a feat/battle scaring system could be added to specialize and further balance the game. This could be similar to the system in Darkest Dungeon where each soldier can gain good or bad traits based on their stress level. High stress can gain traits faster but it is a complete dice roll if the trait will be good or completely ruin that soldier. For instance, after running 5 consecutive missions without rest, a shotgun guy panicked when a reaper zombified a civilian, gaining a Jittery trait. This trait lowers the maximum morale point in exchange for halving the AP points when shooting up close (< 2 tiles). Or after killing 3 aliens in one turn, a soldier gained a Battle Hardened trait, which give him a +5 regeneration of morale. Or having 5 melee crits in a row to gain Bloodlust trait, increasing the chance of random friendly fire in exchange for health regeneration through kills. Morale effects can have a few: - A Wraith suddenly teleports in - Reapers zombifying people - An Andron breaching a wall like Kool Aid man - An alien hurting multiple soldiers with one grenade - Soldier goofing up like throwing grenades at their own feet or dropping their weapon

I agree. At first door opening should only be made using high explosives because the alien interface is still largely impossible to understand. As more of their tech get reverse-engineered, research can be done to open doors but some doors can be still locked from the control room. This will lead to research of a plasma lance, serving as both a weapon and a tool. It can be a devastating melee weapon that cut through androns and other aliens wearing heavy armor like butter, but also can be used go through ship hulls and doors.

I think niches for laser weapons could be set up being similar to Underrail. Where heat based weapons have a small chance to cause the burning effect that cause biological enemies to panic for 3 turns where they run away trying to put out the fire and if they die burning alive would lower all surrounding enemies morale as well. Adding some small mechanics where laser weapons having the larger ammo capacity (hell you can give each magazine the ability to be used as improvised explosives like in 40k to make them even more amazing). Plasma weapons on the other hand can completely disintegrate an enemy with a critical hit could be cool. Then adding it with a cooling mechanism where after a certain amount of shots a combat engineer could use specific tools in late game to reset. Before that you are forced to use plasma in conjunction with mag of laser weapons. I would also like to have more one off weapons derived not only from the research tree but also political favors similar to X1’s singularity cannon. For instance in the process of researching mag weapons your researchers accidentally discovered a way to weaponize the grav manipulation modules on a UFO (the only way they create artificial gravity on their ships) as the Graviton beam gun. This weapon can’t cause direct damage, but can use as a debuffing weapon. When hit an alien is drained of a part of their APs according to the power level of the gun with has 3 modes: - light fire: shoot a weak graviton beam, consuming 1/4 of the energy cell, draining 20% of an enemy’s APs. - regular fire: shoot a medium graviton beam, consuming 2/4 of the energy cell, draining 40% of an enemy’s APs. - concentrated fire: shoot a strong graviton beam, consuming the entire magazine, draining 80% of an enemy’s APs. That’s not all however as any flying enemies hit with this weapon will instantly fall to the ground a take exponentially more damage the higher up they are and the intensity of the beam. Which would finally solve the problem of fliers constantly flying away at the end of battles by just splattering them on the ground. This is just a small example but there’s much more equipment that can be put on the tree like: melee weapons derived from armor research, teleport modules from researching the alien elevator, gyrojet bullets being able tied ballistic with mag weapons,...

@Comte Pseudonyme I like your idea of making the alien behavior more distinct. I also think there’s another way to create new aliens while still technically still the same species of aliens, that is having alien ranks being not only a separation of gear and weapons but also genetic implants: For instance, a generic Sebilian is just another combat platform to the Praetors, and as the creatures rise in rank, they will be given different genetic manipulation to make them more and more varied based on different species of reptiles: >lieutenants can spit poison like cobras and have more snake-like, more slender body with head flare and fangs >captains can have shell plates that act like riot shield with a stockier body, with beaked head like a turtle >commanders having an extra melee attack with a jaw like a crocodile and tipped with alien alloy augmented teeth as well as all other abilities of their lower rank counterparts While the Caesans can be manipulated for their role as fodders, pilots and low level psy troopers: > Caesan pilots due to the need of controlling motherships during long space transits have completely degenerated legs with their fingers sub dividing into arms. Being able to wield heavy weapons like rocket launchers on their anti-grav supports >Caesan Hivers have themselves fully made for being thrown into the meat grinder of war. They have their psy ability modified to have multiple bodies sharing the same mind. Which means they’re a hive mind squad that acts like the soldiers in FEAR. >Caesan psyker have their bulbous head crackling with a power field that weaken enemies around them and suck away morale every turn. They’re protected by a layer of power armor. Things like this will show the alien being nothing other than tools for the alien overlords and a grim glimpse of humanity’s fate if we bow down to the praetor. Even a more upgraded Reaper is possible. Where their head and brain is completely replaced by a scouting drone, giving them the ability to wield multiple weapons at the same time, something like Endless Space 2’s Cravers. When the body is too heavily damaged, the scouting drone can detach from the body and attack as the creature’s second phase. More aliens would be really nice, but I think we could top other games in the same genre by having more non-humanoid aliens. Something sorely lacking in these kinds of games. But if Goldhawk is lacking in time this is the next best bet.

We seriously need a way to roll the grenade when used indoor. That way not only would the the game not needed to caculate throwing arc but it would also prevent hilarious bugs where the grenade just drop on your soldiers feet and explode.

This is a really good point. I think the strategic layer of the first game had its faults in that it offered to little options in playing and because of that railroad many players who are not really fond of the dogfights into a dead end. I think their could be some good foundation for fixes already established in X2. For instance the ability to build non base structures. This can offer huge possibilities for players that hates the air combat by simply replcace air coverage with static missile bases that can be upgraded with more advanced weapons and defenses as time go on and relations with the regional faction improves (ie having soviet or Nato troops garrisoning or energy shiels to negate bombardment entirely). The biggest difference will be that the placement of these structures will not change at all and is bought from a friendly region. The air defense with static structures will then force the aliens to concentrate on attacking to missile platforms by landing troops and capture them which in turn will make the game more focused on ground combat. If you dislike such a thing then the structures can serve as debuffing for the alien vessel fighting above their zone of influence while buffing your own aircraft by showing the UFOs stats and health. Even the secret agent mechanics at first teased by early versions of X2 can be further expanded as a gate way for special factional missions (assassination, protection, kidnaping VIPs; foiling alien deals; wiping out gangs smuggling of alien tech; sabotaging Nato/Soviet efforts to gain relations with their opponent or increase your control in the two factions,...). Or something as simple as adding another level of complexity in interogating alien prisoners which always disapointed me in the first game where redundant captured aliens were just unceremoniously put to death rather than used as moles, snitches,... Ah but this is on the context of the setting comes in to play. The aliens pretty much have full space superiority and has used it to wipe out most of the two main super power's military with their orbital bombarments and any further mobilization is still crippled due to power play and paranoia of the cold war. Xenonauts was stuck in the middle of this and only proved their effectiveness at the first stage of the invasion but still looked at with suspicion by the two major benefactors. The aliens clearly don't want complete annihilation of Earth because they would have done so from the start, so maybe they only want to colonize Earth and subjugate the native populance the same way major British corporations started the colonization of India. Which mean the actual funding of Xenonauts is kept secret from the rest of world and the invaders. Which means any actions of the Xenonauts is disavowed by both powers. That's my take on the event anyway.

Being a relatively new member of the forums, I’m curious, what were those high ideals? I only started following the development after the devs canceled the terrible new base building and unworkable air combat. Seeing how it played out by now, I agree. There’s pretty much nothing you can do to mitigate the damage and it’s nothing but a way for millions to die senselessly. It took people out of investing for the campaign when you can do nothing to stop it. At least have some way to gather intel to let the population evacuate or in the late game build city wide shields to stop them.