Kamehamehayes
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Posts posted by Kamehamehayes
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9 hours ago, Chris said:
Beyond the tactical UI and bugfixes, the coders also found time to implement a proper re-arming system for interceptor weapons (previously the planes would instantly rearm when returning to base) and then do some work to support the final mission. In classic X-Com style we have decided to make this a two-part mission so we needed to do a bit of work to support this, but it all seems to be working. Both maps need further playtesting and visual improvements but in theory it should now be possible to properly win the campaign when we release the next build.
It has been quite awhile since I've seen a two part final mission in an xcom game. I've always prefered having two maps for an endgame mission rarher than one big map. It just felt better pacingwise two play to consecuative missions than to play one really long one (occationally, this leads to the map becoming a slog imo).
But Firaxis, Snapshot, nor you guys chose to use that kind of design for the final mission. Is it easier to just design one big map or is there somesort of a major benefit to having one big map (or deficit to designing two smaller maps) that makes most studios gravitate to one big map for a climactic final mission (I have very little designing experience as you can probably tell)?
Hoepfully the ui and environment polishing work goes well. The other environments already look great and i hope the xenonauts base can see the same level of quality.
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5 hours ago, Solver said:
Came across a design issue that seems a bit less straightforward.
So aliens can attack your secondary bases. That's almost certainly a good thing. The issue is, how are players expected to defend against that? With the weird mechanic of attacks just happening, defence through airpower X1 style isn't option. Just risking the loss of a base isn't an option either - losing a small base sets you back a couple million and loses a lot of strategic advantage. I enjoy games that punish mistakes but even so recognise that losing a base is a huge setback, most players would probably just reload.
To defend secondary bases, you need to build defensive facilities. They're good but you still cannot rely on them exclusively because of the risk analysis. Defences could destroy the UFO but if they miss or do partial damage, you lose the base, regardless of whether the UFO took 0% or 99% damage. Then the only right option, strategically, is to station soldiers at every base so that you can run a base defence mission.
Here it gets a bit problematic, the idea of having soldiers everywhere makes narrative sense and could be fun but it's not viable in the game's economy. The minimum requirement then is an additional Living Quarters and at least 6-8 soldiers (if counting on missile batteries to do a lot), and even that's risky, you'd really need to ship proper equipment to the soldiers. A squad of privates with ballistics won't do great if defending against Androns and Wraiths. At that point the resource overhead of defending a base becomes huge, you just cannot afford that.
I'm not sure what a good solution is here. If the intention is for each base to have a defensive force, that needs significant economy tweaking to be viable. If the intention is to rely on defensive batteries at secondary bases, I think that would not be a satisfying mechanic as it amounts to a periodic die roll that determines whether you lose the base.
I didn't think of that either initially. It sounds pretty bad for a player to get blindsided by a base attack that they cannot defend against.
Although, there are some measures already in game to alleviate this. You can get Sentries as soon as you do the MARS research. They are cheap units that require no investment to train, receive the same upgrades as a MARS so they will never become irrelevant, and they can be rebuilt in the workshop for a cheaper price if destroyed, but they can only be used for base defense missions. You can also stock a base full of these because the weight concerns cited in the xenopedia for carrying vehicles in the dropship are irrelevant and they don't take up living quarter space.
I think this is good for having a good way of defending a base, but I think the game doesn't do a fantastic job of conveying this utility to the player. From the research text for the sentries that I've seen, the text is very small (only a third of the page) and it does not make base defenses seem like a crucial part of the gameplay loop, so it makes these guys seem pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things when they are pretty important for defending bare-bones bases. And of course there is the obvious issue of what if the player decides not to build them and gets punished for it.
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2 hours ago, Solver said:
- I'm undecided on having enemy HP clearly indicated. It's probably a good addition to the gameplay but it makes the first meeting with an alien less impactful. I'd suggest enabling HP indicators, per alien race, once you've completed an autopsy. That would make the initial meeting more interesting (you don't know how strong that creature is!), and even make more sense in-universe. For your soldiers (with their combat computers?) to recognize how damaged an alien is, they need a rudimentary understanding of the alien's biology or construction.
I agree with this a lot. One of my favorite things about Xen 1 and the Original Xcom was the fear of the unknown. When encountering a new alien race for the first time, the player has no clue what they are or what they're capable of. The player would act a lot more cautious and it led to a better gameplay experience. When hp values are easily seen by the player, most of this fear goes away almost immediately. The player knows around how tough the alien is already based on the hp and armor values. Allowing the player to see the hp and armor values of aliens after completing an autopsy or an interrogation also sounds great to me. It makes sense thematically and this might get players to actually start researching autopsies and interrogations instead of ignoring them.
2 hours ago, Solver said:- I've been a fan of base defence missions ever since Xcom but I still don't feel happy about the forced base attack the game does now. I understand why it's done, we want to avoid players easily shooting down all UFOs before they can attack a base. But it feels jarring and very gamey to me. In a game where everything is tied to Geoscape events, suddenly it throws a base attack at you which just screams "hey we really want this to happen but ran out of better ideas". I'm not sure what a better solution is though. UFOs that go straight for the base so leave little time to respond?
I'm not a fan on how this base attack was implemented either. I definitely want for more base attacks, terror mission, and alien base missions to happen more often, but can't think of a good solution. The current implementation feels wrong. Maybe the old Xcom route of sending really massive ufos that the player has no hope of shooting down yet might be a better way of guaranteeing that these missions happen, but that will probably feel just as unfair as it is now. Perhaps letting the player know about base attacks and the like ahead of time so the player can prepare for the attack might be an okay solution, but that undermines the fear of the unknown I was talking about earlier. I got nothing.
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12 hours ago, Chris said:
Secondly, we may put Alloy Rounds in the game, which are an alternative to standard kinetic ammo clips that have higher armour penetration but do less damage. The concept being that energy weapons are reasonably effective against all types of enemy but Ballistic / Gauss weapons can be loaded with appropriate ammo mid-battle to take on whatever the soldier is facing. This means that kinetic weapons are deceptively deadly because they negate armour better than energy weapons, provided the player carries the right ammo into battle.
The reason why we might not put the Alloy Rounds in the game is that it requires some irritating UI updates to support and it means we have to reduce the reload cost of weapons significantly, otherwise people can't do that and then shoot afterwards. But I guess that's not really a huge problem for ballistic weapons given they rarely run out of ammo anyway.
Perhaps you might not have to reduce the reload cost of weapons in order to switch ammo. From what I see, the cost of reloading a weapon is a set cost regardless of a soldiers max tu. Instead, you might be able to change it to use a percentage of a soldier's max tu instead (say 15-20% of their max tu maybe). This would allow for a player to switch the ammo on any unit and fire their weapon in the same turn regardless of what kind of weapon a soldier is currently using or how pathetic their max tu is.
Although the other question is when would the player be able to acquire said alloy ammo. It would be a pretty interesting design choice to give the player the option to research alloy ammunition right after the player researches alien mag weapons and alien alloys. That way the player can make an interesting decision to either research laser weapons or to research alloy ammunition and keep the ballistic/accelerated weapons competitive with laser weapons if the player desires.
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I don't know if I agree with Gauss Weapons having a buff to out compete laser weapons in damage. Gauss weapons have significantly more ammo than their laser counterparts. This makes Gauss weapons the ideal choice for longer missions like Base assaults and terror missions, while laser weapons are most effective when it comes to short and sweet missions. It is supposed to act like a sidegrade to laser weapons, not outright replace them in this regard.
I think the main issue with gauss weapons is their availability instead of their damage output. Laser weapons can be researched and built in the first month of the campaign while gauss weapons require research that is not available for a couple of months. With such a large amount of time between getting laser weapons and getting gauss weapons, many players would probably expect more of an upgrade to laser weapons than a sidegrade, probably making it more worth it to wait a little longer for plasma weapons than to get gauss weapons in the eyes of many players.
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1 hour ago, Xenokyle said:
Hi There, for whatever reason it seems whenever I try to download this mod, all I receive is an empty zip file.
Most of the downloads are broken due to the recent forum hack. You might try coming back in a couple of weeks to see if the download works, but there is always a chance that the download is lost forever.
Alternatively, maybe someone has a copy of the file hand on their desktop somewhere? Maybe you can try joining the Xenonauts discord and asking if someone has has a copy.
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49 minutes ago, Chris said:
Gas grenades have actually been removed from the game for now - the engineering project that unlocks them is disabled. It's easy enough to add them back in if I want, but I just felt like they made capturing enemies a bit easy. Stun guns / stun batons seemed a much more interesting way for the player to have to capture aliens.
How does everyone feel about gas grenades? If you like them, what is it that you like about them?
In Xen 1, I always liked how it was a safer, but more unreliable alternative to stun batons and electroshock grenades. Stun batons ad electroshock grenades were always more effective and efficient at capturing aliens, but gas grenades allowed for a safe alternative for the player if they did not want to get up close with the aliens.
If the stun grenades were to be added back in, then you should really emphasize the unreliable aspect the them. Perhaps have the damage they deal be extremely sporadic, ranging from minor chip damage to more meaningful damage. Some enemies can also be completely immune to its effects. Gas mask wearing cleaners, for example, could be immune to the gas's effects; this might make capture cleaner vip missions a little more interesting as you have to put yourself at risk to capture the vip if they wear a gas mask. Melee aliens like reapers and sebillian brutes could also either resist or be immune to the gas, so it forces the play to get up close and personal with them if they want to capture them.
These are just a few ideas, but I always liked the idea of gas grenades.
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2 hours ago, Chris said:
The biggest new feature that we have added this month is something I want to test out for potential inclusion in V24, which is an updated power system for your bases. This will allow you to improve the functioning of a building by feeding it more power - e.g. increase the range on the Radar, the research speed on your Laboratory, etc. As you can unlock better power generation buildings as you advance down the tech tree (as well as more advanced buildings that consume more power) this will hopefully create some interesting choices for the player. However, we just won't know how good the system is until we test it, so I can't make any promises about it being in the final game.
So how will this mechanic work in game? Will having more power passively increase the effectiveness of these buildings or will there be a way to manually tune how much desired power is going into each building? Both perhaps? This mechanic sounds interesting and i hope it works well in practice.
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On 4/18/2022 at 1:00 PM, Chris said:
This is a bit of a diversion from the topic, but that's up for debate. You can view easy mode as "cheat mode" where it's impossible to lose the game, or you can just view it as a game that is less challenging than normal. I see it as the latter.
But yes, if we're giving people the option to turn systems off entirely then that's pretty much analagous to your cheat mode but just using a different name.
Perhaps there should be an extra option to make ufos and terror missions to have more panic for those people who want to remove the orbital bombardment while still wanting a decent challenge on the geoscape. I know that there are a decent chunk of people who might find the game too easy, yet will still continue to hate the bombardment mechanic, so buffing the panic caused by other sources might be a great idea to satisfy the needs of those people (and satisfy the needs of crazy people who somehow find the hardest difficult in the main game too easy, with new mechanics and all).
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Will the lead scientist be called Dr. Snidley in the game too? I saw that many people called the lead scientist Dr. Snidley and it would be cool to make that name canon.
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yeah, you can go over and switch to the community edition by going to the game and selecting properties> betas> then go over and select the community branch form the list. It should get rid of the most frequent bugs and glitches. I don't know if switching to this would break your current save game, so maybe start a new playthrough to be safe.
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I've noticed in Xen 1 that civilian casualties do not really affect the outcome of a mission that much. Sure, the results screen gives you a score based on how many you saved, but I did not notice any difference with funding or relations afterwards. Terror missions should be a mad rush to defend an invaded city from the aliens, but you can just take your time and slowly fight the aliens at your own pace without any negative effects.
I'm wondering if making the deaths of civilians more impactful will improve the gameplay experience substantially. I would probably make it as a reward for finishing the mission with more civilians alive instead of as a punishment for not meeting the requirement. Perhaps some bonus cash for saving enough civilians would be enough to get some players to play a little faster and slightly riskier and make Terror Missions a little more exciting without actively punishing other players that prefer to take it safer (perhaps a 50% increase in monetization in the mission for saving 50% or more civilians would be a good enough bonus).
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2 hours ago, ooey said:
Well, you will find the young amongst us to be more impatient, naturally. We are all different. There is no getting away from the fact that the longer the younger of us have to wait, the less interested they become. Being old, I only play a very few games (mainly War Thunder, Strategy titles like HOI3 and even UFO: enemy unknown/xen1). Being young, there are lots of shiny games about to distract them away (my 18 yo nephew plays all-sorts). Xen2 is one of a very few old-school turn-based games in development now - let's not turn them away from it.
Seeing as xen2 is reasonably similar to xen1, you would think that many lessons had been learnt from xen1 which would have cut the development time dramatically. I never really minded if xen2 was to be a more refined and feature-packed version of xen1 (with a better ending).
Alien: your passion is good, and your English is fine! But there are always going to be different viewpoints; neither is right or wrong really. It's really Chrisses decision and he will have to live or die by it. There was nothing wrong with the way he went about xen1, so why not do it with zen2 (that is release rough, refine later)? As long as players are aware this is his strategy then I think all will cope.
Not necessarily, I'm around 18 myself. Not all of us are as impatient as the general stereotype labels us as. I actually really like some of the old-school design that comes from games like this. The Firaxis Xcom games, while great, cut out I lot of the gameplay that I liked from Xenonauts and the ordinal Xcoms. It just feels really restricting to have your soldiers automatically assigned a class, can only bring 1 item to a mission for most of the game, and cannot do basic things like shooting first then moving or being able to shoot anything on the map. My favorite thing about Xenonauts is how free it felt in comparison and how little it holds your hand at the start of the game.
I think Chris did learn from the lessons that had been learned when he developed Xen 1; I just think that he made different mistakes than he did before. I do agree with Chris that it should be released publicly when it is possible to play the game all the way through without many game breaking bugs or major workarounds. It would be a better first impression than releasing it earlier, but I also agree with you that a public release in the next few months would be great.
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Just now, Jon. said:
One more question, will beta players have to pay for it when it has released?
No, the open beta should be free just as it was initially planned. However, the early access release will have to be paid for in full price.
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38 minutes ago, Jon. said:
Does it mean the beta will open once again before release or it will not?
It will in all likelihood come out as an open beta before moving on to early access and finally a full release.
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1 hour ago, Jon. said:
Hello, I have done everything on the steam page, So how do I join the beta?
Unfortunately, you don't. The open beta has been delayed until further notice, so the only people that have joined the beta are kickstarter backers.
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7 hours ago, Charon said:
Since Xenonauts is written in Unity, and Unity is written in C#, and C# compiles to IL i can potentially see the creation of hooks that people can take advantage of with Harmony. For all important functions and data there could be hooks written so that people can splice in their own code. That would especially include map generation, but also all other important parts of the game.
After the game is finished developing mod compatability with Harmony could increase the value of the software to unprecedented levels, and give modding capabilities never seen before without having to reveal the source code ( though no code written in Unity is ever really unknown - cuz of IL ).
Just something to think about.
As of now, do you think that Xen 2 with harmony will be as modable or more modable than Xen 1 was? If Xen 2 matches or surpasses the modability hat the first one had, I would be really happy.
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At this point, the game gets done when the game gets done. There is not any point in promising a release date, though a release date of a playable open build before December is not out of the question.
I guess we will have to see with v23 how playable and polished it is. If it all goes well, then an open beta or early access launch in December would be pretty feasible. If some of the numerous new mechanics end up needing to be rebalanced and retrofitted to address player feedback, then it might delay the game a little while. Chris may or may not want to re-test many mechanics like orbital bombardment, soldier stress, and offices before releasing an open build as well, delaying it further.
There is still a lot of work to get done, so prematurely announcing a release date now would not be a great idea.
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On the topic of alien abilities...
The cleaners should be completely immune to all forms of gas attacks because if their gas masks. However when they take enough damage, their gas mask should crack or break, allowing for them to be affected by gas.
It would be interesting if alpha reapers had access to minor forms of psionics that can panic your soldiers. It would synergize well with the normal reapers and make alpha reapers a high priority target.
Perhaps wraiths should go into a ghosting state when they teleport. I remeber taking out wraiths pretty easily in xen 1 because they lacked the tu to defend themsleves after teleporting. Ghosting after teleporting will make it more difficult to kill them after they teleport.
What is the purpose of the mantids? They seem like pretty weak and frail creatues with no niche at the moment, so what is the niche that they are going to fill?
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14 minutes ago, Komandos said:
The fact that after the "shots" the soldiers will "reload" for some time at the base is a good idea.
Xenonauts are weapons in the hands of mankind. In order for the "production" of quality soldiers to be sufficient, their presence in battle must be redundant.
In essence, Chris is trying to get a large number of experienced soldiers, leaving a small number of them in combat.
Im alright with that. I prefer having a lot of reserve soldiers to do multiple battles with more than more soldiers per battle.
Essentially i want more battles more than longer ones.
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1 hour ago, Komandos said:
You will never be able to create a sense of the seriousness of the threat in the player if the effort of 8 people out of 8 billion living on the planet is enough to win.
If the plot was about small "space criminals" (that do not pose a great threat to humanity) for the detention (liquidation) of which a detachment of 8 policemen was created, then I would agree with your point of view.
The stress system is going to increase solier counts significantly. You will be rotating soliers around all the time to do more missions. I dont think there will be an issue with 8 soldier juggernauting the game anymore. Which is great as that really made the game too easy imo.
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3 hours ago, Komandos said:
If you look at the playability that openXcom has to offer and look at the Xenonauts' software limitations (which will make it harder for players to create new mods), it's safe to say that the game is missing its chance.
Personally, I don't care what balance the game will have: good or bad. I'll make the right one myself. But it is important for me whether the game will be convenient for modifications and whether the game will forget the software limitations that Xenonauts 1 had (for example, I could not create my own transport and recruit a team of more than 16 people).
If anyone is interested in my opinion.
Fair enough. The modding experience is very important after all. While I personally want a game that is already great at base, anyone should have the right to change anything and everything about a game.
I remember looking through the forums some months ago and saw that Goldhawk was going to implement modding tools into Unity and better organize files so the community would have an easier time modding things into X2. I hope this means that X2 will have better modding support than X1 did.
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10 hours ago, drages said:
I want to see a great X-2 game. I wanted to tell what I feel and see as a follower. Even AAA games have very bad and broken development periods and we see the results.
I just want to say, stop designing things and finish what you have. You are not happy with it? Patch it after development.. Do you want to add more? Make it DLC, free or paid.. but finish the game first as it is. We passed the time to change those kind of things anymore.I hope the best for you and this game.
I'm confused. You were bashing the game for not having enough new content to justify purchasing it, but now you are rushing the devs into releasing the game as soon as possible? If lack of content is the issue, why would you rush anybody into releasing an incomplete product early? And justifying releasing it early by releasing free updates and DLC later to fix the game's issues is the exact same pitfall that Phoenix Point fell into. People want to play complete games, not unfinished ones. DLCs are supposed to expand the original product into a new experience that allows the game to have more replay value, not to justify cutting content out of game because it is taking too long.
That said, I am not opposed to releasing the game in an early access or open beta state soon. Much of the community has been craving new content from the game since the Demo a year ago (I am one of those people after all). It might be time to give the community a taste of the game. I am not opposed to DLCs either. If they add a lot of new content that drastically changes the gameplay experience to have a much different feel to the base game, than I'm not opposed to it at all and can improve replay value of the game.
I feel that the game should be released when it is ready, without being rushed by members of the community into releasing the game too early and without cutting out major content form the game due to time constraints.
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7 hours ago, drages said:
The idea of giving magical stats to UFO when you send more interceptor is very lazy and wrong balancing method ever. This is arbitrary, this is cheating and this is non-sense. You can't punish a player if he just uses what the game offers him. I don't know why you did think this is needed and a good idea at all.
You balanced it at X-1, many modders made it more balanced and more fun, and god knows at X-Division, we made it balanced with 200+ UFO's.. we never needed a magical buff for UFOs. We added unique weapon designs, as you did which is a good think at X-2, we add tougher ufos and gave them good escorts as the game developed.
You can rise the difficulty as player gets better for whole game wise but not at tactical level like this. This is not realistic, not logical. Really why would a UFO suddenly get tougher if you send one more aircraft. Did you ever ask this question to yourself? At a realistic alien invasion simulation game?
I'm not entirely sure about this mechanic either. It just punishes the player who sent multiple aircraft with a stronger ufo, which is an odd design choice.
However, the tactical benefits could be interesting. In X1, sending in three condors or three foxtrots was always the superior option than sending in a marauder. It was one of the main reasons air combat got boring later in the game. Three foxtrots can destroy every single landing ship and battleship with no issue while one or two marauders don't deal with them as well even though they are a much higher tech level. The corsair had gotten a irrelevant really fast because you can just make more condors for cheaper. This new mechanic could change that balance for the better.
"Realism" has always been a touchy subject for me. I always prefer the gameplay benefits out of a mechanic than it being more "realistic". I don't think that X2 is being advertised like a realistic simulation game anymore, and I think that is a good thing. We are talking about a game where a super secret government organization only gets paid millions of dollars, only receives rookies, only has a small handful of scientists and engineers, fight against aliens that are at least hundreds of years more advanced than us (that's like Napoleon attempting to defeat the modern U.S. military, there is no chance of Napoleon winning), and the aliens conveniently send in their weakest foot soldiers and ufos first before sending battleships many months later. Realism is not a big part of this game, and is not the most important part.
I'm willing to wait a week or two to see how the mechanic works in-game. Speculation like what we are doing here does not accurately reflect how a mechanic would work in-game. If the mechanic just proves it is annoying and frustrating, then it can be tested and then removed. If the mechanic has merit but still has issues, it can be tweaked for a better experience. This is a beta test after all; the whole point of a beta test is to test potential game mechanics and give feedback on how to improve them.
Help Me Participate on Xenonauts 2 Beta
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
There was (and probably still is) an open beta planned to let more people into the beta. All you have to do is go to the steam page and click "request playtest access" or something along those lines. You should have to scroll a little bit to reach it.