Kamehamehayes
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Posts posted by Kamehamehayes
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I have seen a lot of people talking about how the gameplay of Xenonauts 1 was a worse than the original Xcom because Xenonauts removed some of the mechanics that added some complexity to combat in Xcom. The main example I see sited is that in the original Xcom if you used burst fire and the first shot hits a wall and destroys it, then the other two shots form the first would go through the hole that the first one made and potentially hit more targets beyond the wall (like an alien or another wall for example).
I would like to know how common this opinion actually is across people that frequent this forum and if these mechanics should also be ported into future versions of Xenonauts 2 (if they are able to be ported relatively easily). I personally do not find this to be a deal breaker or anything near the sort, but extra mechanics like these are always welcome if they improve the complexity and fun of tactical battles (given that they are not a big hassle to implement).
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13 hours ago, JohnSmithTA said:
Hmmm, maybe I'm not understanding this, but is the implication here that the game could be entirely completed in less than 30 hours?
Admittedly I never played the vanilla Xenonauts but instead played with the X-Division mod, but I think I got 100s of hours of gameplay from that.
On a side note, are the devs interested in fostering a modding community? X-Division really was so cool and made Xenonauts one of my top 5 favorite games. I imagine it could drastically improve the lifespan an value of the game as well, as is the case for Xcom 2I can't speak for Chris here, but I think the 15+ hour game time mainly comes from Chris's own playstyle. I remember Chris talking about how he was surprised about how many missions and how many in-games days most players ended up accumulating compared to what he and his team intended. From what I understand, Xenonauts was supposed to be 15-20 hour experience per playthrough and was balanced around that, but people ended up doing a lot of extra missions even when mechanics like air striking were added to reduce the tendency to go on every mission possible. The pace the player goes through the missions and geoscape also affects the final time significantly and as the lead of the Xenonauts team I would expect Chris to have a high knowledge of the game that allows him to go through the game at a faster pace (because he knows the maps, tooltips, mechanics, etc already while most players probably will not).
I do have some experience playing the "open beta" and have tried the game myself. From my personal experience and from watching other people play the game, I would say that Xenonauts 1 and 2 are both around 30 hours ish at a brisk pace but Xenonauts 2 is much more replayable due to being an upgrade in every conceivable way and having much more developed mechanics. Although if you were one of those players that went to every mission, your Xenonauts 2 campaigns might be shorter than Xenonauts 1 because the game adds several extra mechanics that dissuades going on lots of extra missions (notably the sell cost decline where the more you sell an item, the less it is worth and making soldier grow much more slowly as they gain experience than they did in Xenonauts 1). Nothing is preventing you from going on those extra missions mind you, but you get much less reward out of it compared to airstrikes in Xenonauts 2 than you did in Xenonauts 1.
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6 hours ago, Komandos said:
The player should be able to: solve any problem that arises in the game without resorting to the help of advisors. The player should be able to solve the problem on their own, even if the player has to reduce the difficulty level of the game.
Therefore, I am in favor of the game having the necessary tool for this. In X1, such a tool was the ability to easily and quickly edit the parameters of the game.
I have seen some games nowadays have the option to reduce the difficulty mid-campaign if they feel the difficulty they selected is too difficult or not enjoyable. I feel like this game can implement something like this too and increasing the number of soldiers could be an option if the player switches to a custom difficult, but this certainly should not be the recommended solution as I feel players shpuld be encouraged to usr the vast amount of tools the game gives you to problem solve as opposed to dumbing down the problem itself.
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5 hours ago, anarchy_79 said:
Hi all,
thanks for a cool game, devs, I played maybe 50 hours in XN1, and now perhaps 10 in XN2, and while I really love both, I also suck at both.
I play on normal in XN2, and I like the challenge, and don't mind the difficulty level.
I do however lack in tactical skills, and would love some input on how I should think about entering the battlefield.
I would appreciate a general rundown of squad composition, and then how to maneuver the various roles and understand what their purpose is.
I have watched what little tutorials on XN2 there is on YT, but I think I need professional help here.
Thanks, cool to be here!
Yeah, these kinds of games are difficult to fully get into if you are not well versed in tactical games, but it will get much better as you keep playing and get more experienced. I do have some starter tips though.
Team Compoaititin and loadput advice:
1. For soldier stats, I find strength and time units to be the most widely useful as they both allow you to bring more uttility items onto the battlefield and to take more actions on the field itself. Other stats often radically change in general usefulness depending on playatyle and team composition, and should be considered later when you have a playstyle nailed down (like on accuracy if you do not like engaging aliens from a short distance, or reflexes to prevent alien reaction fire for shoeter distances for example).
2. It is perfectly okay to not have have a "balanced" team of various classes. If you really like shotgunners than making half of your team shotgunners is completely fine for the most part for example. You never need to have one of every class or even have all ranges represented or anything like that. (I personally really like using shotgunners aggresively in the earlygame and slowly progressing to a more "balanced" team as the game progresses).
3. Make sure to make good use out of utility items like various kinds of grenades (demolition, smoke, and flashbangs are the main ones), and equipment (for extra armor and accuracy) to load out your soldiers with (this is mainly what having soldiers with high strength was about in point 1). Sometimes, you can do weird builds like equiping a soldier with a shotgun and a sniper rifle if the soldier is built balanced enough in order to do that as well, so you can get effective builds that are much different than what the game generay encourages to use.
4. It is a good idea to get a Mars early on fpr its high stats early on, it is expensive but you get an incredibly strong soldier without the training needed to grow it. It will outclass most of your soldiers for most of the game (with the exception of endgame soldiers or strategoes that rely entirely on reaction fire).
5. In terms of the in game economy, the present and immediate future are the most important things. If you need to build up your air force (for example) but you are afraid of losing funds from the sell cost decline, you should sell them anyways because the short term benefits of getting a better air force can reduce panic and make the game easier, which can often make up for the money defacit in the long run. This can apply to virtually anything from soldier equipment to base structures. But if something is necessary for your success, sacrificing future monital gain is worth it for the short-term benefits imo.
Very general combat tips:
1. Always have a backup strategy in case a crucial shot misses. This one trick will save you a lot of deaths and rage over the unfair rng. This backup strategy can be as simple as throwing a smoke grenade to reduce casualties or supressing an alien (likely with a flashbang) to reduce its time units on its turn.
2. Adding on to point 1, never assume that high accuracy shots will indeed hit their target. In a game where you are repeatedly relying on rng hundreda or thousands of times to make shots hit their mark, you will see shots that have even a 90% chance to hit miss many tomes across a campaign.
3. Always make sure to achieve some small objective every turn. This can be to move forward, kill an alien, or make the next turn more impactful by getting closer to a mission objective. Making no progress can hurt you a lot if you are time pressured or are dealing with psionics. There are some missions that do have "turn timers" or soft timers due to reinforcements, but at an efficient pace where you are achieivng something evey turn, these missions (and potentially the game as a whole) will get much more lenient.
I might be able to give you much more specific tips if needed, but if there is anything you want to be explained here, than I can clarify for you.
3 hours ago, Komandos said:If the game increases the number of soldiers in a tactical mission (at the "beginner" difficulty level), then the requirements for the player's tactical skills will not be so strict. It is easier to change the balance of the game by adjusting the maximum number of soldiers on the battlefield than to adjust a huge variety of other game parameters to make the player's squad feel comfortable.
I definetely disagree with this a lot (as I have said within some other topics). Increasing the number of soldier does not necessarily make a game easier for a beginner to play (arguably making it harder due to more cognitive load), and it also messes with the game balance a lot as it is more difficult and costly to equip and maintain such a large amount of soldiers, which can mess with a beginner even more due to messing with the economy. I would argue that reducing the number of aliens has a much more positive effect on beginners than increasing soldier count.
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24 minutes ago, CaptainSPrice said:
Now soldiers are +1 to stats while they did perform insane amount reaction fire all of them xD
user_soldiers_stats_bug_part_5-23.json 1.95 MB · 0 downloads
There is a mechanic in this game that makes soldiers gain stats more slowly the more of that stat they have (a soldier with 40 str will lvl up str faster than a soldier with 80 str for example). So soldiers will only gain a small amount of stats if they have a lot of it while they grow really fast when they have few stats.
I think it is important to know what their stats were before the mission to determine if the mechanic is broken or not. And knowing your general strategy of camping a corner and spending a lot of time using reaction fire to take out the aliens, it would be unsurprising if a soldier with below average stats gained a lot of stats from such a strategy but will gain much fewer stats once they perform a few missions with the same strategy.
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Yeah, i believe the ability truggers for every miss unless the psyon is suppressed.
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33 minutes ago, Solver said:
I am not sure what's going on here exactly but it feels like aliens using psionic attacks as reaction fire of some sort. Here's a starting save from an abduction mission. If my soldier misses a shot then that soldier usually gets mesmerized or even mind controlled straight away. Should be easy to reproduce by playing a turn, perhaps two.
auto_groundcombat_turn_1_start-53.json 1.34 MB · 0 downloads
Was it against a psyon? One of the psyon's abilities is to psionically attack a soldier that misses a shot against them, with a small chance to mind control them.
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That's good translation has gone mostly smoothly. Hopefully localization and translation has minor hiicups either.
I do have a few questions on the initial campaign options.
-for all of the values that we can edit (like initial funding and soldier surivial rate), will we choose from a list of options or will be able to type in whatever value we want?
-for "project duration", will disabling it make it look like X1 or will it not show any information at all, or will there be three options for enabled, disabled, X1 style or something like that?
-what does "achievement difficulty" mean, and does it have a gameplay function?
-if the endgame laser event continues to be part of the game, will there be an option to disable it and/or reduce it?
-will we be able to change the missions types that appear in our playthroughs or their frequencies in our playthroughs, where people who likes faster paced missions can make them appear more often while people who want to take their time in an xcom game can reduce the prevalence of those missions or outright remove them?
Good update, and am looking forward to testing v27.
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I'm wondering if there can sometimes be some kind of weather condition(like rain or snow) that can occur in ground combat that can shake up the maps visually and somewhat mechanically even if the player gets the same map.
Perhaps the line of sight can decreased by a couple of tiles and hit rate can be decreased by 1% per tile. I also believe that there was a xenopedia entry for X1 that mentioned energy weapons being less effective due to weather conditions (the mag weapon one I think). This could perhaps be implemented in-game with energy weapons' attack power being reduced by 5-10%. I think weather conditions should be shown on the mission details screen and occur on around 20% of missions.
I would not mind if the effect was enabled map wide even if soldiers are currently inside. It would be an ok price to pay if something don't make total sensefor the sake of more map diversity. I don't think story missions have to be affected by this either.
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I began in an earlier version of v26. All of the patch notes seemed to say that the saves were compatible with each other, so I just continued a playthrough from v26.0 that was updated through all of the hotfixes that came out afterwards.
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1 hour ago, Chris said:
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.
That's weird. I was able to reproduce after following those exact steps, and was able to crash 100% of the time.
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Originally, I could not make this bug report here, so I pinged Chris on discord instead, and I made another topic here after I could get back onto the foruns. I tried using MARS burst rocket fire on a few sectons in smoke that had a 0% chance of hitting and the game crashed to desktop after showing red error text. (originally had to compress the log file in order to send it through discord initially)
Repro steps in video
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51 minutes ago, Chris said:
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The question about the Alien Plasma Weapons is an interesting one. I think you're right that having both Guardian Battle Armour and Improved Lasers unlocked immediately is probably overkill. One of those two projects should also require Alien Electronics to unlock, and possibly Guardian Armour should be a research project in its own right rather than something that autocompletes.
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I think I might make Guardian Armour something you need to research, and maybe also make the starting Combat Armour an early research project and then move Warden Armour up another tier. Then there's not too much of a gap between getting the Warden and the Guardian. Although the amount of armour suits in the game is kinda ridiculous at this point as almost every UFO unlocks a new suit of armour.
- That said, the danger here is adding another 3 research projects to the tech tree (as the Warden and Guardian currently auto-unlock) when the early game is already very crowded.
- If so I'll leave Improved Lasers where it is. Lasers are meant to be superior to Accelerated weapons overall, certainly when upgraded, as they're intended to be quite a bit more expensive. Thing is that Gauss Weapons unlock off Alien Electronics too so in theory the question is perhaps more Accelerated >> Gauss or Lasers >> Improved Lasers >> Fusion Weapons? Although I'm not sure if that works in practice.
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I think I might make Guardian Armour something you need to research, and maybe also make the starting Combat Armour an early research project and then move Warden Armour up another tier. Then there's not too much of a gap between getting the Warden and the Guardian. Although the amount of armour suits in the game is kinda ridiculous at this point as almost every UFO unlocks a new suit of armour.
- In general I think I'm fine with certain weapon tiers having a particular type of weapon that's a bit OP and another that's a bit weak. If the Laser sniper rifle is weak but the LMG is great, that probably actually ends up being a bit more interesting than them all being a straightforward upgrade imo.
That’s interesting. If you’re okay with certain weapons not benefiting as much from each tier, then I guess that’s fine. I never had a problem with it, but noticed it and thought I’d point it out.
I think the weapon balancing is fine for the most part. I would probably have to play more to find more issues with them, but I’ll highlight what I think the progression feels like to me.- It seems to me that the progression of weapons more closely follows Ballistics < Accelerated </= Lasers < Advanced Lasers </= Gauss < Fusion (probably, have not tested them)
- Accelerated weapons and lasers are about equal right now imo (with laser being slightly stronger). Accelerated weapons have some armor piercing properties and have much better ammo while lasers have better shredding, easy aiming, and terrain destruction, with damage being very similar for the most part. On some more accurate soldiers (like higher ranked ones or snipers in general), the easy aiming ability is not very effective while much more ammo is probably more appealing than the rest of what lasers offer. High armor is not as common in the earlygame as it will be later, so the armor shredding is not extremely effective imo (except on specific missions like the cleaner base) While on less accurate soldiers, lasers patch some accuracy issues with no penalty to weight, making them preferable. I could easily see any player running both kinds of weapons on their squad.
- Gauss weapons and advanced lasers are also close, but with gauss weapons having an advantage overall imo. The contrasts are mostly the same as accelerated weapons vs lasers, but with gauss weapons having a big advantage in damage while advanced lasers have effectively infinite ammo. This is later in the game, so easy aiming is not as effective as it used to be, but the armor shredding is more appealing now with much more aliens coming in with armor than before. I do not really know the specific damage thresholds that gauss weapons can reach that advanced laser cannot, but is feels like gauss weapons can better eliminate aliens than advanced lasers can in general (with them being around the same when dealing with particularly tanky aliens).
- I’d have to think about what to do with armor projects. Having a bunch of projects would clutter up the research screen I bet. I would assume a cleaner (ha) solution exists somewhere.
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The question about the Alien Plasma Weapons is an interesting one. I think you're right that having both Guardian Battle Armour and Improved Lasers unlocked immediately is probably overkill. One of those two projects should also require Alien Electronics to unlock, and possibly Guardian Armour should be a research project in its own right rather than something that autocompletes.
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4 hours ago, asdfcyber said:
Specifically options related to difficulty?
- Option to let the quantum building thing reveal information globally instead of per base
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Multipliers for a lot of things:
- Building cost
- Building base stats (storage space, power generated, radar range, etc)
- Engineering cost
- Item cost, airplane cost, build time
- Damage taken and damage dealt
- Soldier base stats
- Aircraft fuel use
- Ground combat rewards
- Monthly report rewards
- Panic
- Amount of terror missions / base assaults / other 'hard' missions
- Base survival rate
- And probably a lot of other things
- Option to reveal ground combat maps fully on landing
4 hours ago, Skitso said:-Strategic camera height: close/medium/far/dynamic
-Strategic HUD scale: 5-300% (or whatever is suitable)
-damage numbers: on/off
-ufo crew multiplier: 0.5-2.0 (or whatever is suitable)
-night visibility range: 0.5-1 (or whatever is suitable)
Yeah, I agree with all of these points. I'll just add on to them as I would have probably put all of these points down already.
Balance
- Soldier growth rates (potentially bring them down to zero so they don't grow at all)
- Alien and ufo stats (to mess with them on a more granular level)
- starting amount of money
- the option to assemble the initial base however the player wants
- changing the cost decay on items as their sold (and potentially lower it to zero for people not interested in that mechanic)
- changing the turn limits on many missions, like on alien abductions and xenonaut victory on crash sites
- changing research and engineering decay as you get more scientists and engineers (potentially lowering to zero)
- option to remove the endgame laser event if it still exists by release
- changing the amount of rewards for a mission
- having a setting so someone could auto-win all air combats and/or ground combats (essentially cheat mode)
- option to remove alien health and armor values
- option to see exactly what research projects unlock after completing the previous research project before researching it
- option to make the dropships/planes go to their destination instantaneously
- make all killing blows knock aliens out instead
- change the likelihood of certain alien species appearing in a given playthrough
Qol
- option to shuffle in music from x1 to increase music variety
- option to mess with how common each track plays
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9 hours ago, Twigg said:
- The economy is not great atm. The price drops for some things are massive and don't see to recover. This is aggravated by the fact that I am often forced to fight lots of ground battles to get the required alien alloys so I have this huge amount of alien corpses, guns, and grenades that barely sell for anything.
I did not personally have that many issues with the economy so far in my playthrough. I generally sell stuff when I need them for an important engineering/base building project and leave them alone when I don't need them. And when I do sell things in bulk to the point that their price is reduced a bunch, I get new items as the invasion progresses that I can then sell for full price. Perhaps you got a lot further than me and this becomes a much greater issue (I got to day 170ish I think).
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I do have some more things to add to the discussion after play the game for a little longer
Ground combat
Issues 1 and 2 are directly connected to one another
1. I feel like the "plasma weapons" research project is far too strong at the moment. It allows the player to build guardian armor (and advanced lasers if they researched lasers already) immediately after researching the project. It directly upgrades soldiers much more potently than some other projects of similar length (like heavy lasers for instance). I feel like the "advanced" lasers" project should be locked behind another project as well to balance to balance it out a little bit (perhaps behind alien electronics so that the player can distinctly see that they have the option to upgrade their lasers or to research new gauss weaponry.
2. I feel that the choice between accelerated weapons and laser weapons is actually extremely balanced in the beginning. Each of them has distinct strengths and weaknesses that allows for a team of soldiers to justify using both kinds of weapons at the same time, which I find pretty awesome. However, I feel that the "advanced lasers" project allows the player to directly upgrade lasers too early and they end up being objectively better than accelerated weapons for the most part due to mostly losing the limited ammo issues and can deal more damage than accelerated weapons on top of their other benefits. I still think that "advanced lasers" should be locked behind some later project as well just like in the previous point.
3. I feel like the variety of ground combats take a direct hit after the cleaner base is completed. There are mostly just crash sites with sometimes terror missions, alien bases, and abductions sprinkled in. There is not enough mission variety imo. I'm not too worried about this as I know some other story missions are in development and new mission types are going to sprinkled in. On a similarly related note, I never actually encountered a landed ufo in my 170 days I had played up to this point; they probably need to be made more common to mix up some of the crash site missions.
4. I don't know if I just got really unlucky or not, but I had never encountered enough sebellians to complete the medkit upgrade project. I had one sebellian mission near the start of the game on a destroyer, but I had never encountered another one since in my 170 day playthrough. I also seemed to encounter sectons and psyons much more often than any other alien species. I think there should be some sort of system that makes it more likely for ufos to spawn with alien you don't fight as often so the player can experience the aliens in more equal amounts.
Geoscape
1. There seems to be an issue with the amount of money received for collecting the bounty on a ufo instead of doing the missions. I remember scouts being like $100,000 and destroyers being $125,000 or so, but then observer ufos were worth $200,000, and then abductors and cruisers fell off a cliff being worth $100,000 again I think. It feels really weird and I assume a very jagged progression like this was not intended.
2. The engineering projects seems to very alloy heavy for the most part and do not use alienium very often. This isn't necessarily and issue or anything, but I never every found myself in an alienium drought at any point during my playthrough.
3. The base batteries used to defend bases from ufos seem to have a weird progression as well. It starts with lasers that require no alien materials and only costs $200,000. but then you can gauss batteries and it costs 150 alloys. I think this is an absurd price to pay for upgraded batteries and should be reduced and also require some amount of alienium (and the laser batteries should cost some alloys and alienium as well).
4. I don't know if I just missed it or if it is really removed from the game, but I did not see a means to melt down alien weapons into alloys and alienium like you could in previous builds. It would be pretty boring imo if you could only sell the alien weapons that you require and not do anything else with them. I also did not see any way of making alienium in engineering neither. Which is weird because you can make alien alloys, so why not alienium?
Air combat
-I encountered this really annoying issue where I intercepted a craft with two escorts and then targeted the main craft with my torpedo interceptor. The interceptor ended up wasting its missiles on one of the escorts because it got in range even though I was not even targeting the escort. I don't remember if this happened in x1 or not, but I feel this issue is really annoying whenever one is facing escorts. Interceptors should only attack targeting ufos imo (unless they currently are not targeting any ufo).
Edit:
I've generally thought that the machinegun was quite strong and sniper rifles generally weak over my few playthroughs. I've starting experimenting with both more and I found some interesting things about both that I want to go over. I want some weird stuff that I encountered with both when it comes to the laser weapon versions of them. One thing I do know for certain is that the ammo restoring properties of advanced lasers should be better defined, likely with a xenopedia entry and new tooltips. I know that might take awhile, so I'm willing to bet something like this would not be implemented until v28.
Snipers:
-I've noticed that the base laser sniper rifle is almost completely worthless on most snipers. Snipers have a high accuracy stat and probably have an accuracy boosting accessory to bolster it even more, so they will almost always reach or surpass that 65 accuracy threshold where the "easy aiming" ability works, making one of the main selling points of laser at base completely useless. Perhaps this can be adjusted for laser sniper rifles so that the "easy aiming" ability works for up to 75 accuracy, so snipers can still benefit.
-This is very different with advanced laser with regenerating ammo. If it works like I think it does and restores 1 ammo per turn, that means that a sniper will have infinite ammo because they literally cannot shoot more than once per turn. This is slightly busted imo (if it works the way that I think it works) and probably needs to be adjusted somewhat for snipers (like making them restore 1 ammo every 2 or 3 turns).
Machineguns
-Machinegunners often struggle with having strong accuracy and strength at once to make the best use out of the machinegun, so the laser machinegun is great for patching some of their inherent accuracy issues and making them more useful in general (destroying lots of cover and walls with it is a nice bonus as well).
-If the ammo restoring properties of advanced lasers is how I think it is for machineguns as well, then it would be not very useful whatsoever for machineguns. You would have to wait three turns to shoot once with a machinegun in x3 burst, much less x10. I feel it should definitely be adjusted to restore 3-5 ammo instead imo.
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I don't have screenshots for the bounties of other ufos, but the cruiser's bounty is much less than an abductor ufo, which had a bounty of $200,000 I believe.
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Press "end turn" and a servitor should come out of the teleporter and immediately die to reaction fire, and not explode.
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This one is not a big issue and has a relatively easy workaround. Just select "end turn" and all of the aliens that can be seen because I took the control room will disappear the next turn, unless the mars up in the control room moves a tile.
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Press "end turn" and one of my soldiers in the bottom level should be shot by a wraith above and fall unconscious (in the area with 4 teleporters).
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I shot the cloaked wraith with the stun gun and the cloak did not visually disappear. However, the effects of it seem to disappear as it was shot.
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Weather conditions in ground combat?
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
For some reason, I missed this post for months. I think this post is kind of genius. It would make sense for the aliens to try and terraform the Earth if they wish to conquer it, and they could do that via the climate weapon you just described. This would also somewhat fix the way that the orbital laser is implemented now, which is by causing continuous panic after a certain date of the campaign and forcing the player to do operation endgame or risk a game over. By replacing the lasers with a climate weapon, it would instead cause missions to become more and more difficult everytime and would make the player complete operation endgame out of the realization that they are struggling more and more to win battles and will have to complete operation endgame quickly or risk casualties and losses. This shifts from a hard doom timer that forces the player to do operation endgame or risk a guaranteed game over to having the player learn the alien's superiority and eventual victory from experience rather than from an arbitrary doom timer.
Although, this idea might have some balancing issues that might be somewhat difficult to address, but I feel it is definitely worth exploring.