Shadooow

Did you even read what I wrote? I am complaining that there are almost no differences between difficulties when it comes to tactical battles. I am replaying the game on lowest difficulty (Recruit), and the battles are just as hard as they were at Soldier. Enemies do same amount of damage, their defenses doesn't differ either (HP/armor) and I have a hunch that there are a same amount of them in the docks mission as there were at Soldier (I will try to confirm that later, I lost drive to play this game anymore). Reinforcements behave the same too. Number of rounds to complete the objective is exactly the same too. The only thing I found different between the Soldier and Recruit is that at Recruit, enemies can actually miss sometimes. From my observation it feels like they have 75% accuracy with any gun and any range. At Soldier difficulty this was nearly 90%. I am losing over half of my team in every mission, and that is with the unrealistic 25% chance of "resurrection" after completing the mission (Recruit difficulty setting). And I need to reload each mission at least 5-10 times - because I lose too many soldiers too early from enemies flanking me (or in night from enemies I can't see, but they can see me despite they use hazmat suit in night lol). Only after I know where enemies are I can finish the mission with losing only half of my team lol. Sadly the game is way too hard and the super long loading doesn't make that any better. I completely lost mood to play further after I got into mission with flying oneshotting drones with 150hp and the reptilian ufos with crazy accuracy against my units. In 3 turns I was already in deep shits and about to lose half of my team from flanks, on top of that my soldiers were missing that big flying drone like it was a fly... Not fun experience sorry.

I admit I am not using flashbangs much, In fact not at all, somehow they were missing in my soldier loadouts (I guess I had no weight and wanted to give them this nanite module and better armor). I sent some soldiers on a sides to complete the secondary objective and to deal with hidden cleaners there and moved 5 soldiers including heavy MG and sniper into main objective building, there I used explosives on a wall and hidden my mercs behind the desk. Unfortunately they didn't have clear line of sight, too many objects in path so I just tried to suppress them with MG and went inside with assault soldier who got oneshotted by leader the moment I stepped inside the room. And by the time I kill the guards inside that room by flanking them from a side with another assault soldier, the 7th round hits. Well it is impossible to describe all my actions using words. I admit my strategy was suboptimal. My point is that the differences between difficulties are not visible.

1.25 I ended up with 3 soldiers only so was hard to figure out how exactly the reinforcements works. I could swear that in previous gameplay on Soldier they spawned every turn despite not killed, but I am not sure now. I loaded turn 7 again and killed the reinforcements on one side by the time of 8th round and they didn't respawn from that side and they respawned in round 12. So I was wrong. And this is now totally fine. Still, one would expect that all these timers and also reinforcement counts will differ difficulty by difficulty. There are actually 6 new cleaners in the reinforcements, not 4 as I though, and this seems to be the same no matter which difficulty is selected. Idk, I slept for it and today when I replayed it from round 7 enemy had bad RNG they missed most hits and the cleaner reinforcements that hit me just for 22/25 damage and I was able to complete the mission without losing any more soldier from that point which is an acceptable result (6 soldiers survived out of 9). I guess I got good RNG this time as the leader missed both of his shots?

Ok so I replayed the game on lowest difficulty settings, because I got into dead end on Soldier difficulty in the cleaner cell mission where I am supposed to capture the leader in 7 rounds. And I don't really see any differences. Now I am trying to win this same mission which I postponed and get bit better tech, but I already reloaded over 10 times and all my attempts ended up with half of my team dead, rest wounded and the cleaner leader at 95hp. I doubt this mission is doable in any other way than on second attempt once you know where all soldiers are and where the leader is and taking advantage of that knowhow. - enemies have insane CtH, both aliens and humans, they are hitting way too much given that they should have CtH penalty on lowest difficulty - this is related to cover not working very well, anything but total cover feels useless and kneeling doesn't seem to impact enemy CtH either so is just waste of time units - enemies are oneshotting my soldiers regularly with rifles. If I get hit by several shots from some burst fire be it alien weapon or heavy MG so be it, but single fire?. Now this can be understandable for aliens as their weapons are superior, but still getting oneshots at recruit feels way too harsh. I can't imagine how this scales with difficulties, will that shot be for 74 instead of 54 damage into warden armor? - the round threshold is identical between soldier and lowest difficulty. I would expect this to scale. Those 7 rounds in the said mission are hardly enough, I barely broken into the room where leader is in both gameplays (not knowing which building it is and by enemies surrounding me from all sides which had to be dealt with first doesn't make it easy to just bruteforce inside). - reinforces are spawning endlessly even on lowest difficulty as well immediately once the duo gets eliminated. And they spawn in same numbers despite the recruits should have reduced amount of enemies. To be clear I managed to complete the mission, but escaping with 3 soldiers from 9 at lowest difficulty seems a bit too low to me. All the strongest soldiers with best equipment got oneshot or two-shot by the leader so I don't want to accept this result and will try to replay it from scratch (maybe with the stun baton this time) once again... Tl'dr. I know I am probably not good player and I am doing many things wrong, but so far no mission was doable without reloading many times - if I didn't want to leave with 3+ bodybags. I understand that this game isn't Jagged Alliance and the soldiers are expendable, but I would expect the lowest difficulty to be a bit more forgiving. I honestly don't see difference at tactical battles between Recruit and Soldier.

Not really. You can often throw the grenade from behind total cover. Even in cases where you cannot you typically need to get the enemy under 15 HP to stun him with smoke, so someone has to shoot him first which is where the enemy can shoot back, then throw smokes. And smoke grenades stack, you don't have to wait for enemy to take turn if you hit him with three smoke grenades he falls unconscious immediately. It is the exact opposite - if you don't bring enemy under 15 HP beforehand, then enemy will shoot back when you shoot him with pistol or strike him with baton. Even if he doesn't attack back, if the stun pistol/baton doesn't stun him immediately, then the soldier is just dead because to hit with those you need to be super close unlike smoke grenade. I started abusing this lately a lot, have no problem to capture at least 1 alien every time, in fact the biggest issue is that my soldiers are killing the enemy with overwatch if the enemy doesn't get stunned in my turn. EDIT: Let me put it this way: Anytime you get any alien to 15 or less HP it is a free capture using smoke grenade(s) with pretty much zero risk as you can throw grenade from very far away and retreat under total cover. Both pistol and baton needs close range to be used/effective so if you instead want to use those you are risking possible enemy overwatch, return fire or just simply missing and ending up with no time points to escape. Hence smoke grenades are overpowered. The more I (ab)use them the more I see that. Game simply doesn't care about the alien having multiple shot wounds despite the original mission suggesting that the scientists wants alien without such wounds. As long as the alien drops unconscious it doesn't matter how much and what type of damage he was inflicted.

Yes I agree. Not that it would be too easy, it still requires to drop the enemy low enough, and it works well only inside buildings, but as it is now, the stun batons and stun pistols are way too risky and much worse option. It is too hard to get close enough to the enemy to hit with it, and even when you do hit him with pistol or baton they only take around 15 stun damage, which means that he will kill you next round unless you damage him low enough beforehand. But if you damage him under 20 beforehand, then smoke grenade does the job from much large distance while your soldiers are hidden behind obstacles. Additionally it takes much more space/weight than just 1 extra smoke grenade. So really no point to engineer those. The easy solution would be to not allow smoke to stun (every) aliens, ie. give them immunity against smoke. It still suppress them so the benefit of the grenade is there, but it won't allow player to easily capture aliens even before the plot suggest it to the player (I managed to capture alien in first battle now when I am replaying it over).

Hi, good to hear from a dev. I think that this is main reason for my struggles. I was trying to not to lose anyone. Therefore I played it as safe as possible, not rushing into choke points - not sacrificing soldiers so that the enemies inside spend their overwatch so I can rush in with rest, and also playing the battles on multiple fronts because I didn't know where my target (cleaner leader) is. And with that style those 7 rounds were not sufficient at all which became unplayble when reinforcements started coming each round. Once the player knows where to go, I suspect the battle is perfectly doable in 7 rounds especially if one is prepared to make sacrifices. Still that seem to be too tight time schedule on second difficulty and could definitely use some loosening, at least on lower difficulties. With this clutch schedule it feels way too linear.

Oh I want that medal!

Ah okay that will be it. I thought there will be some issues if I lose too many soldiers, if there are none then I was playing it wrong. That being said, replayed the game on lowest difficulty, the second tactical mission where we encounter the reptilian type of aliens, I moved my shield soldier close to alien on left side, shot him once with over 70% CtH, that was a miss. That gave the enemy overwatch - another alien from opposite direction from super long range hit me for 50 into backs, that made my soldier to turn 180° (and rotate to the alien he was shooting at by backs) and then the alien I was shooting at finished this soldier. So now I know I am expected to lose a few soldiers every battle, but this feels too harsh. Especially when the reptilian alien is supposed to have short vision, thats why I ran towards 5 tiles of alien on the left, so the alien on the right is too far from me...

Hello, playing Xenonauts last 4 days and I like this game a lot. Wanted to give you some feedback. First of all, my background. I bought Xenonauts 2 after massive disappointment from Jagged Alliance 3. I never played any of the X-COM games, only Jagged Alliance 2 which game I love. I was even participating on a development of the 1.13 mod which improves it massively. Ok so, love the graphic, music!, plot and all those lore texts. I love the tactical mode, much more than in JA3 where it is annoying as hell. I didn't encounter many bugs so far, I think the only issue ever was that one of the UFO extraction combat didn't save at 1st turn automatically and because I lost many soldiers (2 times in row) I had to load an automatic save from the geomap where I was asked what I want to do with that crashed UFO. Now, what is interesting is that each of this reload completely changed the map - I am not sure if that is intended or good thing. Maybe the map should be chosen already when the UFO crashes? Overall the game is very fun and elaborated, I won't list all the good stuff that I like, the list would be too long. So here is the list of things which I didn't like or which seemed wrong to me: 1. Loading times. Loading times are very long. I have some other applications running simultaneously and playing Xenonauts in window mode and on my i3-8100 3.60Ghz / 16MB RAM computer takes over 2 minutes, maybe even more. This needs improvement. At least loading of a save of the same type should be made faster, ie. if I am in tactical mode and load up old turn it should load faster than if I loaded game saved on geomap. 2. Pathing via windows. Soldiers loves taking shortcuts via windows breaking them and jumping through them. This doesn't make sense. Of course it is great that the game allows to break/jump through window, however it shouldn't be faster than entering via door 2 tiles away. Likewise it doesn't make sense for enemies (Cleaners specifically) to break the windows of their base to come at me. 3. CtH / Obstacles. I am always trying to cover behind some obstacles and put soldier into crouched position, but it doesn't seem to work. Enemies are hitting me extremely reliably and for ton of hitpoints. Especially the first UFO with magnetic weapons are hitting everything from any range and almost always oneshotting my soldiers. I suppose that this is intended, their weapons are supposed to be strong, but even when fighting cleaners, the only working strategy was to hide behind wall, never behind anything smaller than half the Z weight. 4. One more remark about obstacles, opened doors doesn't seem to provide any cover and can be shoot through and my soldiers can see enemies through them. 5. Lastly, difficulty. I chosen Soldier difficulty and despite I have experiences with turn-based games, namely Jagged Alliance I find the tactical battles extremely hard. I am going to replay it on the lowest difficulty, because I just can't clear the Cleaner base. I reloaded so many times, but once the 7th round hits it becomes impossible to finish the mission. This is because every single round spawns 4 new soldiers on map, 2 from each side. So if the player doesn't kill/stun the leader before there is no chance to finish I feel. Especially thanks to above point 3 where enemies are hitting me far more likely than I can hit them from much bigger distance where I can't even see them (was night map, they saw me without flares, I need flares to see them). 6. Oh and I forgot abut civilians - that the random civilians wander aimlessly is fine I guess, but civilians which I liberated from the pods should move into my ship, not wander aimlessly and even move towards enemies. That being said, thanks to that I didn't lose soldiers lol. In my opinion, the limits or rather the round thresholds where enemies get reinforcements or where captured civilians get killed/whatever should be set much higher than the minimal number of rounds needed to do it depends on a difficulty. Maybe it is already the case of course, I only tried one difficulty so far. Additionally, at lower difficulties, it should be possible to brute force the mission through reinforcements. Let player to deal with them and give him more time. Meaning that the reinforcements shouldn't spawn each round but say every 4th round at easiest, 3rd at soldier, 2nd at the 3rd difficulty and each round on hardest difficulty. As I come from JA2 I lack progress here. Enemies are using assault rifles from day 1 and are sniping my team with them with incredible accuracy. I would expect the difficulty to ramp up slightly over time, but maybe I am just expecting a different game. It is also possible that I play this wrong trying to save everyone and not accepting my soldiers dying. If that is the case then the high difficulty comes from that expectation of mine that I should finish the mission with all soldiers alive. Related to that, I don't see much of a point of assault type of soldiers. They are risking too much and even when getting close, have low CtH (because they spend half or more time points on movement) so they are almost always dying or at lest taking heavy damage in my gameplay. I need to try with just a riflemen and snipers along with 2 shield holders.