Kamehamehayes

All of these changes look very interesting and fun to try, good job to you and your team. If you have the time, I am very curious to know how you are planning to implement features like geoscape situations and human psionics, with the psionics in particular. Are you going to implement human psionics as a brand new weapon type into the game or are you implementing it in some other way? If you read this post, thank you for your time and know that you can spend as much time as you want and need with your loved ones.

Adding back packs would probably make the soldiers look much cooler. Though I don't know how difficult that would be to implement. I don't have access to the game yet so I can't say anything about the late-game armors.

I agree that the visuals should be updated, but the way bases are managed could easily change so it would be a shame if the devs make a bunch of new, great art and then have to scrap it since it doesn't fit with the new systems. It would be nice if you could upgrade any building into their superior (generator into alienium reactor, labs/workshops into quantum labs/nanotech workshops, etc) for a reduced cost and building time so you don't just waste time and money you spent into the original buildings just to demolish them so you can get a better one.

I don't think adding more 2x2 buildings to the game is a good idea (unless you add some other system that supports more 2x2 buildings). If you look at MrAlex's screenshot you should see that the base is almost full, and that he hasn't placed some of other buildings like labs, storerooms, missile batteries, etc. You probably wouldn't have any room if you added more 2x2 buildings to the game. MrAlex and Alienkiller have been proposing outposts for awhile now which would help alleviate the issue if it worked kind of like a mini-base. It would be very restricted in what you can build (you couldn't build extra labs, workshops, or improved radar) and it would be pretty small (4x4 compared to the 6x6 of the main bases); however, you could use it to build extra hangars and storage spaces so it could make 2x2 hangars work (otherwise there wouldn't be enough space in the base to build other things if you have 4 or more 2x2 hangars).

In your opinion, do you think that v19 would be ready for the open beta or should the open beta release wait until v20? I really want your honest opinion.

I don't think it is necessary for everything to be in limited quantities; I just think that everything that come in unlimited quantities should be designed by the engineers first before they are available. The technologies at the beginning of the game I think should still be in unlimited quantities; they are pretty common in all militaries across the world (which are directly funding/suppling the xenonauts) so I see no reason to have to buy them. Ammo for weapons should be in unlimited quantities since it is just a nice quality of life addition, I do agree that anything that requires alien materials to build should not be in unlimited quantities (excluding certain things like explosives, since low-grade alienium is extremely common in almost all ufos) and have to be built by the player. Speaking of upgrading weapons. On the battlefield, is there a reason to have ballistic/accelerated weapons over laser weapons? Do certain aliens have more thermal protection than kinetic protection making it worth it to use a ballistic/accelerated weapons over lasers in some scenarios?

The standard weapons, steel plating, and other stuff that you get in the beginning of the game should be available in unlimited quantities without the use of a research project or for the engineers to design them since their technology and final designs were already there before the invasion began. Stuff you research afterwards (like stun weapons, upgrades explosives, etc) should be unlocked in unlimited quantities after the engineers make a suitable design for them as the scientists, while very intelligent, only come up with prototypes that aren't as effective as they could be, so it would be up to the engineers to come up with the most effective final designs. This system would happen faster for stun weapons, which are made up of materials and technology already found on earth, than it would for alienium explosives and alien-alloy plating, which are technologies that were not already on earth before the invasion began. I don't think this system would be necessary for things that come in limited quantities since that should just be part of the manufacturing process so it would be unnecessary. It would also be nice if this was directly put into the lore of the game, which would make the engineers seem much more important than they did before. Your idea of outposts seem really interesting, and the idea of slow upgrading base parts seems really cool to me too. I don't have that many ideas on how to improve these ideas since I haven't actually played the game yet (I've only seen the first couple of hours since I don't want to be super spoiled for the coming open beta). Since this question seems to bee in line with this thread, how is the manufacturing economy in this game? Can you manufacture stuff purely to sell for profit or can you not to it in this game either.

yeah I agree that the engineers should develop a suitable design before you unlock things in unlimited quantities (stun weapons included). It's nice that they engineers have a lot to do in Xenonauts 2. In the first Xenonauts they kinda just sat on their butt half the campaign since there wasn't that much for them to do after periodically upgrading your gear and the head scientist already creates all of the designs for them, which is supposed to be part of the engineers' job. The amount of work they have to do is a nice problem to have. Also you seem to have posted the same message twice minus the first sentence. Were you trying to edit your post and made a new one instead?

I like games like dragonball fighterz, minecraft, splatoon, and tetris 99. I play all sorts of genres.

I would assume the aliens would not underestimate the xenonauts and assume that the angels can take out the relatively ill equipped scouts, so instead the scouts would retreat trying to keep the valuable information on earth's major regions (like their development, population distribution, general panic level, etc) that they acquired throughout the scouting missions.

I would make them try and run for the most part, their purpose is to scout and they really don't want to lose all of that valuable information to one of the xenonauts's angels. The destroyer should be the first really aggressive ship that the xenonauts encounter.

I mean their purpose in the invasion is to scout, as it is in their name, so they aren't supposed to be super aggressive. The scouts want to feel out humanity's current situation before sending in the much stronger capitol ships and fighters. The destroyer is supposed to be the aggressive early game ship since it has more powerful cannons and is much tankier, it is clearly there to crush low-developed civilizations.

To be honest, I just forgot that was a thing that they implement since I was caught up with improving the air combat and suggesting other things. A zoom-in would be a very nice feature to have.

Of course I think that terror missions are supposed to be some of the hardest and most dangerous missions you come across, feeling outmatched should definitely be part of it, but if players are dying in the first few turns because of mind control then it should definitely be nerfed to some extent (either through directly nerfing it or maybe telegraphing to the player the general direction of the alien that is trying to orchestrate it). The idea of a mission where you are completely outmatched where you have to quickly complete an objective and retreat before the aliens completely surround and overpower you sounds amazing to me @odizzido. It would be a fun and interesting mission with much different tactics and strategies than the rest of the missions. The objectives of these missions could be to escort an important person, assasinate/capture an enemy commander, secure invaluable goods from the aliens, etc. We could start an entire thread to talk about what a mission like this would look like.

So it was the mind control that was killing you guys? Do you think it should be nerfed or should they implement an armor that directly counters it or something like that?

I can't play yet, but if the difficulty curve is as drastic as people are saying it should definitely be adjusted. What was the main thing killing you? Were you outnumbered? Had worse equipment? Both? Or something else?

We could take the best of 360 fire arcs and having a blind spot. We could make the ufo always have a blind spot but the guns can rotate around and attack the interceptor after a few seconds. This would mean that the play can't just stay in the ufo's blind spot the entire battle; instead, they have to constantly move around to take advantage of the shifting blind spot of the ufo. This would be pretty easy for the player to exploit when fighting something like a scout, but it would progressively get harder by making the blind spot more narrow and making the guns rotate faster as the ufos get more and more advanced. You could theoretically take no damage with only having weaker cannons, but the fight would take longer and longer as the game progresses, which vastly reduces the margin for error. I do like the idea of only having one aircraft in most battles except in certain scenarios, it helps balance air combat and it makes stopping alien bombing missions much more interesting. Clouds seem like a good idea, I'm not sure how good they are in practice but we'll see.

Guys what is with the toxicity. We all want Xenonauts 2 to be the best game we can possibly be. But shutting down people's ideas without a counterargument or anything like that just doesn't do anything to improve the game or the community around it; this behavior just turns people away from discussing the game. This is a place where we try to have a civilized discussion about the game while not shunning people because of their opinions. I understand that there are things that are implemented into the game that we don't agree with, heck I don't agree with 360 degree aiming, but that doesn't give anyone the right to shun people and be toxic because they are frustrated. Thank you for reading this and hopefully we can turn our attitudes around before the open beta release.

Sorry I am jumping into this topic really late. I really don't agree with the 360 degree attack radius. With no weakness to exploit there would be no reason to do air combat at all compared to auto resolving, which takes only one click. Instead I have a couple of suggestions (some borrowed from earlier in this board). Different races should handle each ship differently. For example (this is for the scout ufo), the sebillians are less intelligent and more primitive than the rest of the alien force, so they prefer a brute force approach and implement this by having longer range cannons at the front of the ufo but in the process leaving a tactical weakness on the back. The psyons, being the more intelligent aliens, would understand the tactical weaknesses of a brute force approach so they would instead have their cannons take up a wider area around the ufo making such a tactical weakness much harder to exploit, however; their cannons now are weaker and have less range than their sebellian counterparts so a skilled player could bait the ufo into using evasive maneuvers and then use the rest of their missiles before closing in on the kill. This idea would get slowly more complex the game progresses (androns would try to attack the weakest interceptor in the group, wraiths would rather attack the most threatening interceptor in the group, earlier aliens will slowly learn from their mistakes by increasing the range or spreading the cannons around the ufo, etc). This is just my two cents, if you disagree that's fine but the 360 degree aiming needs to go in order to have tactical diversity.

Xcom type games are games where you defend the human race from alien invasion; you have to pick and choose your battles since you can't defend against every threat at once. This improves the game gameplay wise since each mission gives you different rewards making decision making more interesting (you could even do more than one raid if you play your cards right) and it improves it storywise since it shows how out numbered you are against the threat from above. This seems like a successful mechanic to me; I am sad that some other people don't see it that way.

Is that a bad thing? I really do like the fact that it can have multiple alien raids going on at once, each with different rewards, making decision making more interesting. I see nothing wrong with Xenonauts 2 borrowing from the successful mechanics of the new xcom games.

Yeah now is a great time, since they want to give people a good impression of the open beta to build a community around.

Thank you, that clears things up a lot better. Will this system be in the final release?

It's probably much easier to balance a game which have a maximum of 8-12 soldiers than it is to balance having over 20 soldiers. I disagree, it is easier to train a small team instead of a large one. You may say you would lose 12.5% of your experience when someone dies in a small team, but the opposite is true too. Whenever someone gets a major stat up (either through gaining stats by completing missions, getting upgrade to their gear, etc), it is far more noticeable in a small team than it is in a large one due to the same percentages.