Vitruviansquid

This might seem unintuitive after the big milestone patch added a bunch of Cleaner missions with alternate goals and conditions, but I feel it's correct. After you wipe out the Cleaners, you stop having all the neat alternate missions beside abductions popping up once in awhile. Alien missions could do with a pass with a mind toward "Cleanerization" - giving them more different missions with different character. Perhaps developers could sit down and consider "what are some different reactions alien crew might have if the ship they're in gets shot down?" Maybe sometimes the aliens spread out on the map as they currently do and you have the standard mission, but sometimes, aliens try to self-destruct their downed ship and the players have to get to the ship and disable its self-destruct to extract its loot. Maybe sometimes, the aliens call for backup during your mission. I think more could be done with alien classes as a whole. Right now, an alien scientist is just a weak alien soldier. An alien engineer is just a weak alien soldier. And so on. I think there should be strategic consequences for interrogating aliens who have different roles. Techs can definitely be locked behind interrogation of the relevant alien expert on the subject.

Increased tactical depth is fine, but I feel that the game is already mostly about ground combat and doesn't need to also have a super-involved air combat. Strategic depth, which is where the air combat links to the other parts of the game, is what I think the system is sorely lacking but if a rework also improved the tactical depth of the air combat, I don't think anybody would complain.

I am on Commander

The problem, in short: Air combat doesn't present interesting choices for a player in either its execution, when you are playing the interception out, or strategy, when you are thinking about where to locate your interceptors or how to arm them, and it doesn't feel good when you make those choices. The problem, in long: You can play the air combat fairly suboptimally by just equipping your interceptors, whether they're angels or phantoms, with two cannons each, and just fly at every existing alien craft and blow them up. You'll do some barrel rolling to dodge enemy shots, and you're going to take a few hits, but this strategy has worked enough for me to go all the way to day 200 against every craft that exists in this version of the game. You can do a bit better if you'd like to, by equipping your phantoms intelligently with shit like torpedoes (a phantom with two alienium torpedoes and a Gauss Blaster will do better against an abductor than one with just two Gauss Blasters, but I'm not sure laser lances have a role at all), but you don't have to, and it doesn't feel terribly like you've fucked up if you didn't, nor does it feel terribly triumphant if you did, because, after all, no matter what method you've chosen to use, unless you did something really obviously dumb like fail to bring enough weaponry to actually down the UFO or just not fill your hardpoint slots and weight slots, then things will be kinda alright. And it doesn't feel terribly triumphant if you have the ideal build to defeat a UFO because none of the options you have are super different. They all exist for the same purpose of downing UFOs, it's just that some are better at it in a situation and some are worse. I feel like I solved (an incredibly simple) puzzle when I put together a build that works against a UFO, not that I chose a strategy and then implemented that strategy. Solutions: The biggest thing to be done about air combat is to sit and think about what strategies should be possible in the game, and then consider what options players should be presented with to enact those strategies. Using guns and using missiles are not strategies because they do not imply different mindsets - they do the same things in different ways. Instead, these are some changes that might give room for players to create strategies to pursue: - Some air weapons are decent while others are excellent, but costly to fire. Recast torpedoes as powerful, premium weapons where you have to manufacture each torpedo at the cost of cash and, for the more advanced types, alienium. Also give these torpedoes a chance to just explode some some UFOs' power sources when they hit, making UFOs give less alienium as loot. The point of this change is simple, to create a difference between interceptor loadouts that you use to down ships for cash and resources, and interceptor loadouts that you use for defending your bases and funding regions. Of course, you would then increase the difficulty of UFOs to make it so that it is difficult to defend adequately with ships that merely down UFOs. - It is very necessary to invest in gadgets for your interceptors that take up weight in order for interceptors to accomplish some of the normal stuff they have been accomplishing without prior. Imagine if fuel tanks gave you like a full 100% extension to your interceptor's range, but without it you really could barely leave the range of your base's first radar array. You would make a decision about how much fuel to take or how much weaponry, based on how many bases you have and how necessary you feel it is to send jets around the world to prevent rising panic or let bases defend each other. Other gadgets that you might be able to kit out an interceptor with might be stuff like sensors to allow the interceptor to scan around it and see UFOs outside without the help of bases' radar arrays, or go faster on the world map. - Make a lot of different levers for the options to kit out your interceptors so making your interceptors powerful in different ways have different strategic costs. Let's say we nix the system with weight, hardpoints, and equipment slots, and just say that interceptors have a missile, a cannon, and an armor. Then, maybe it costs an out-of-the-way research to improve your cannons, it costs way more money upgrade your missiles, and it costs way more materials to upgrade your armor. You balance UFO encounters so it will be generally okay if you have two of the three ship "parts" upgraded and updated, but you might have a bad time if only one of them is, and then you leave it up to the players which ship part they dump resources into upgrading.

I think most of my soldiers' deaths come from being shot at by aliens from out of sight in one way or another. I moved a soldier somewhere, gambling there weren't enemies around the corner, or just outside of sight range, or behind that door, and then the alien comes out and blasts him. What makes the convoy ambush mission too easy is that you know where all the enemies are going to be. To make the mission more difficult (in a fun way), I could only think that you'd need to introduce some degree of randomness to the enemies' location, which would be reconcepting the entire mechanical basis of the mission. So yeah, I dunno.

I agree with this. I think the Cleaners being so easy to shoot on missions, but their base being difficult to attack makes a perverse incentive where you don't actually want to finish the Cleaners off, but instead want to keep "farming" the Cleaner missions to get money and experience for rookies. There should be something about the Cleaners that puts a clock on the players to attack their base. I've proposed in another post that, once you discover the Cleaner base, then other Cleaner missions should stop spawning, and instead the Cleaner base should passive create panic so long as it's there and not destroyed. I've also proposed that Cleaner missions should continually scale up in difficulty so that players feel like it'd be easier to nip the Cleaner faction in the bud rather than having to keep fighting stronger and stronger Cleaners.

Okay, this is probably the last reply you're gonna get out of me, so let me make this one count. Yeah, we know there are different games with different scales. You might notice that Warcraft and Doom also have entirely different control schemes, entirely different pacing, and are in entirely different genres. But we're talking about Xenonauts 2, a game which has already had a Kickstarter campaign and a closed beta, and is now in open beta. You are really not beating the allegations that you are using sophistry or that you honest-to-god just have no idea what you're talking about, if you are implying that Xenonauts 2 can now pivot to being a game on an entirely different scale on a whim. The first paragraph here is built on the interpretation that my argument is about how players self-identify in the game (I think you really meant to say "self insert," but that's neither here nor there). And that's a misrepresentation of what I said, because I clearly said, "It was tedious to keep track of," as my reason for disliking 26 soldiers in those games. And the second paragraph is kind of telling me you either didn't play those old Xcom games or you had no idea what you were looking at when you played them, because no, it wasn't really about player choice to be a "platoon commander" or a "squad commander." In UFO Defense, you had to start with the Skyranger and bring 14 soldiers because that was the best tech available, and then when you upgraded to Avenger and got to bring 26 soldiers, it wasn't really a choice because you were just handicapping yourself if you didn't bring more soldiers when the game let you. These were games that set a challenge in front of the player and tasked them to defeat the challenge, but you're talking about them like they're sandbox role-playing games. Jesus Christ, man, did you just think readers wouldn't notice that you're talking about UFO Defense like it was Stardew Valley or Minecraft, or is this really an actual argument you thought would sway people? This is the first thing you've typed in this thread that I agreed with. Yeah, you have the right to "demand" the game to be anything. Let's just be a bit more honest about your demands, alright? You can "demand" that a machine gun in the game weighs just as much as a machine gun in real life or whatever other thing. When people ask you why you'd want that, just say it like it is: it appeals to your sense of immersion and you've given absolutely no thought to how it'd impact game balance or how much other people would enjoy the game or, in fact, what genre the game set out to be, or what the lead developer has said about the direction he wants to take the game in, or the other objections that I think you routinely read from other posters when you bring up your ideas. Edit: Oh yeah, and if it helps, naming yourself "Kommandos" and then having your avatar be a picture of a sad little blue-eyed, blond-haired boy isn't a great look if you want people to tolerate the sophistry you try to put out on the internet.

Well go on. Tell us which game design concepts you had in mind with your suggestions. I don't think anyone in this thread finds your suggestions to come with too little explanation. This is a word salad trying to pass off a non-argument as if it was an intelligible response to the (extremely straightforward) thing Skitso said. Skitso said that all decisions to change the game has to include game design and balance in mind. You merely pointed out that there are players at different levels as if that makes game design such an incredibly difficult and mystifying task that it somehow invalidates what they said, so that instead of making decisions to change the game to include game design and balance, it would somehow be better to make decisions to change the game based on realism. But this doesn't make sense at all as an argument, because if game balance is such a difficult thing, it actually makes more sense to make every decision to change the game with game design and balance in mind.

I was there and I played those games. Yeah, it was too many soldiers. It was tedious to keep track of and became a detriment to gameplay. It would also be so in Xenonauts 2. An argument that you could have 26 soldiers in Xcom and TFTD isn't an argument that this is a good thing to have. They asked for some explanation of why this is a positive for gameplay, not whether another game you enjoyed had the same mechanic. Games you enjoy can have bad mechanics, and we hope their spiritual successors (like Xenonauts to Xcom) refine the formula, not repeat it by rote. This is such a grossly disingenuous way to respond to their argument. You know they're not talking about changing the entire genre or aesthetic of the game, you know they're not talking about completely divorcing the game from reality so that a gun makes you run faster or survive better, you know that the developers aren't out to make the most accurate military simulation it can, and you know you haven't addressed the main point they're trying to make, which is that they'd like to see your suggestion about how to shape the game come with an explanation of how it'd make the game more interesting in terms of the choices a player would have to decide to make. In lieu of actually engaging with their concern, you've brought out a strawman to just try to make him look ridiculous. This is just sophistry and petty bullying. Now, I haven't been around the forum the entire time, because I only dipped in to give my feedback for Milestone 1 and now I'm dipping in again to give my feedback for Milestone 2, so maybe you've already done it, but it strikes me that Instead of clogging up other people's threads that have productive suggestions on how to improve the game, you can go make your own thread with all your feedback about what's not realistic enough and then see if Chris comes in and says, "wowee! We never thought that a machine gun in the game had to weigh exactly as much as a machine gun does in real life! Thanks! We'll make that change right away!"

A dude's just proposing that soldiers with sniper rifles should be able to take reaction shots and some people act like he wants there to be magic and wizards in the game.

"Meh," on these posts about realism. You look at that real life training with firearms, you look at chess, and consider whether this turn-based science fiction strategy game about shooting aliens looks more like those or chess. If additional realism will make the game deeper and more interesting, then sure. But what I see are posts where Chris, the lead developer, says stuff about how he meant for Strength as a stat in the game to give players an opportunity to make interesting choices with what their soldiers can carry, and then players posting suggestions about how Strength can do just that, and then some dude who really loves realism in the game makes a post to essentially educate everyone about what modern soldiers carry in their backpacks as a way to argue against the lead developer of the game. I'm "Meh" on that idea With all love and respect, I think you should read over and check the tones of your own posts in this thread and possibly other threads if you're shocked that people talk to you that way.

5 is a nutty number of shots for a non-laser rifle to have in this game. If non-laser rifles had 5 shots, Your laser rifles would have to be downright impossible to use. I was thinking you could easily knock the base amount of ammunition in a non-laser rifle from 20 to 12, see how that feels, and then maybe go down to something like 8-10 if players still aren't needing to reload in a mission. It would be great if the game had mechanics to encourage you to shoot more bullets, sure. I just don't think the dev team is looking for a rework of the game's battle mechanics that are radical enough to make it happen.

I think if there was not a percentage counter for cleaner intelligence and the endgame, I think a lot of players would make unhealthy predictions about what's going on in the background. You'd have posts saying, "I guess I hit a dead end in the game, because I can't do anything to advance, but the game isn't throwing anything new at me, either. This game's broken/sucks." It is only acceptable for no counter to exist because you already understand that the game is keeping score for you in the background. So the counter feels unimmersive, but in order to have it hidden, you needed to know that it was there in the first place. So I think the best option is to make another difficulty setting checkbox to obscure progress counters, as Skitso already proposed.

Suggestion 1 - I was warned. I forgot how, but I was. Maybe there should be a pop-up window that appears when you try to embark on the mission with less than three empty slots. Suggestion 2 - I agree, widely, with the idea that it would be nice if the game could support more multiple strategies in different playthroughs. The game kinda railroads you into most of your research choices. You make some small decisions like whether to make accelerated guns or skip them, or whether you want armor or guns first, but then it soon feels like those choices dry up and you're on a railroad for awhile in the early-midgame. You have your lasers and your armor, and then there's a stretch of the game when you kinda just research whatever the game throws at you, until a bit later. But that said, I don't like the idea that every strategy game should have a way to play wide and a way to play tall. I don't think playing tall is a strategy that fits in with the genre. Besides, you can already fit *a lot* of facilities into your main base. You can really just have a main base with everything, then two more bases that just have generators and radar dishes to cover the rest of the world. I don't think you actually need hangars in your alternate bases because even the starting dropship can go anywhere in the world and once you get Phantoms, they can basically also go around the world. Suggestion 3 - It'd be nice to have more customization for your dropship, which would also make the battle-layer gameplay more varied up. I don't know what kinds of equipment besides extra seats a dropship would have, though. Suggestion 4 - You can already do this. Suggestion 5 - I also think this would be neat. Suggestion 6 - This would also be neat, but I doubt it'd be a thing. Suggestion 7 - I don't see this as necessary, because the game does tell you how much TU you'll have at the end of actions and how much actions cost. Suggestion 8 - I dunno, maybe I'm being too radical, but I just feel like the Soldiers screen and the Armory screen should be merged together to begin with. Suggestion 9 - These screens can definitely be streamlined. I agree. Suggestion 10 - I think the current meta is actually for people to get the accelerated guns, then skip lasers, and then upgrade directly into Gauss. I think it's actually not a problem that players end up picking between accelerated guns and lasers. It gives some difference between different playthroughs, and allow players to make a strategic decision. If anything, I think the actual problem is that Gauss weapons just sort of replace the weapons that came before and is too straightforward of an upgrade. It reduces complexity when you'd expect the game to increase complexity as your playthrough goes on.

I'm definitely for the idea of more "levers." - There was an idea floating around earlier where doing alien autopsies should let you create more little gadgets that have perhaps a bit more niche uses that your soldiers can then carry around. Something like autopsying a Psyon lets you craft a module that boosts your bravery a bit, or autopsying a Wraith lets you craft a module that makes your soldier slightly harder to hit. I think more little gadgets in the game like that, or even stuff that's sourced and crafted by the players based on earth technology, means there more stuff players have to choose to have their soldiers carry. - I think all non-laser guns carry too much ammo in this game, but rifles are particularly egregious. A soldier with great marksmanship can wipe out an entire Scout's worth of aliens with one magazine of 20 shots. A soldier with poor marksmanship can kill everyone with 2. Both can certainly go without reloading through an entire mission against Scouts, but also, Observers, Destroyers, bases, and I dunno how big those unreleased Cruisers are going to be, but probably also Cruisers. 20 shots is a lot of shots. 8 shots is still a lot for a shotgun. 15 is a lot for a pistol, but we should let that one slide because pistols are bad in other ways. The other weapons are a bit more okay.

Raising the number of Mantids could do the tricks. I dunno about a ratio of 2:7 normal aliens to Mantids. Maybe 2:3 was what I had in mind. But yeah, they need something more. They could do anything with the Mantids, so long as Mantids are made more formidable. I thought about proposing they get more armor, 5 more accuracy, a new and different gun, a different auxiliary alien type, whatever. They just need something. Anything.

So I got the chance to play a bit further, and I got a few more thoughts. I also deleted my old file on Veteran and started the new game on Commander difficulty. - There's a weird and awkward gap between when you feel like you can walk all over the Cleaners and when you can actually defeat the Cleaner Base so as to rid yourself of them once and for all. This means that, in the interim, between when Cleaners feel unthreatening and when you can take on the Cleaner Base, the Cleaner missions are just a pain in the neck, but you feel like you have to do them to prevent panic from going up. These are just some ideas to get rid of this awkward interim time: 1. Perhaps it'd be a good idea to allow the Cleaners on Cleaner Missions to progress past the stage of having a bulletproof vest and an accelerated rifle. Let the hazmat suit Cleaners, or new types of Cleaners with more advanced tech, show up on Cleaner missions so that the Cleaner missions level up alongside the player for a bit longer. 2. You could reduce the difficulty of the Cleaner base. The turrets and the final room are brutal. I don't know if this is the best way to approach the problem, because I think the Cleaner Base mission does have to have some teeth to be a climactic showdown between you and a major threat in the plotline. 3. Maybe Cleaner missions could just stop appearing when you reveal the Cleaner Base, and you get a story textbox saying that you've investigated the Cleaners to the extent that you found out they're switching their tactics. Instead of having Cleaner missions any more, the Cleaners are doing something from their base to passively raise panic in regions. In any case, there are no more generic Cleaner missions so they don't bug you any more, However, you are still being motivated to actually go and do the Cleaner Base mission because it's passively losing you the game as time goes on. But you do have some control over how the showdown happens - you can go earlier and risk dying to the Cleaners' more advanced units, or you can go later and risk countries having a higher panic level. 4. Or, the same as in option 3, but there's a technological bottleneck that you need to take out the Cleaner Base to get a thing to research in order to break through. - I know I said this once about Mantids before, but the problem's gotten worse since then. Mantids just aren't scary. They're not scary in the narrative of the game; I just defeated monstrous Sebilians with brute strength and alien regeneration and I just defeated Psyons/Sectons with what are essentially magic powers, I'm not going to be scared of some anxious bug guys. They're also not scary in the mechanics of the game: they're as good at shooting as Psyons, their special reaction shots don't come into play that often, and being small is their only strength. The lacklusterness of the Mantids has only gotten more pronounced now that Psyons and Sebilians have become scarier in the flow of the game. Since rebreathers are a thing in the game now, why not have something like Mantids leaking a cloud of poisonous gas when they die? The gas is very dangerous to soldiers without rebreathers, and gives Mantids an advantage in close-quarters combat to supplement their basic decency at long-range combat. That'd make the bugs a bit scarier. - Yeah. I never had to think about what armor I put a soldier in. By now, I have Guardian armor, and it's kind of a no-brainer to put all the soldiers in Guardian armor when you can afford it. - The option between upgrading for advanced medkit and automed module is an interesting one. I don't think you'd ever want to have both, unless you were rich enough to just throw your money around everywhere. The advanced medikit is heavier and can be used on yourself and others while the automed module is lighter, but can only be used on the soldier carrying it. I'd like to see more of this interaction in the game, where you are implicitly being asked to choose two options that are somewhat redundant with each other. I wouldn't even mind if you're shown that picking the one option locks you out of the other, like if you upgraded for automed module, you can't then upgrade your medikits and vice versa. - It wasn't until fairly late in the game that I had the thought, "oh yeah. These Xcom-like games are supposed to have all sorts of neat gadgets and stuff that aren't just upgrading your gun to deal more damage or upgrading your armor to live against more damage." I really think more technologies and engineering projects that one might consider optional should be moved to earlier in the game, or more of these things should be devised to go in the early game, to make the early game a bit more engaging. Give new players a taste of neat stuff in the game without asking them to play for so long.

As always, top respect to Chris for being in the trenches with the community, explaining how the developers view things, taking feedback and also asking the community questions. Also, top respect for people discussing the nitty gritty of the game, giving detailed and reasoned feedback and responses to feedback. On the topic of strength/Heavy weapons/Grenades: I have seen people say the machine guns are good. Fair. I definitely think it doesn't fit in my playstyle, but it's a good thing that many playstyles exist. I'm still kinda convinced that the HEVY is bad because it is such an overkill impractical way of fulfilling functions that grenades already easily fulfill, so in balancing it, you're actually adjusting its balance compared to grenades, not its balance compared to guns. I've attached a picture of one of my more average soldiers. He started at a pretty mediocre 48 strength, he's gotten to 56 strength over a few missions, having risen to lieutenant, I can go into recruitment right now (also attached) and pick up 8 soldiers who *start* with even higher strength. Of those, there are 4 with other stats that are so low, they're disqualified for having some glaring weakness, but I just want to give an idea of how easy it is to have a soldier like Luke Stewart here. And look at all the stuff even this average soldier can carry. He can have the heavy version of Warden armor. He can have a shotgun, a baton, a medikit, one of each of the three grenades that I actually use, and two reloads, which I would have to shoot like the A-team to actually go completely through in a mission. When I move onto Guardian Armor, I will be able to wear the heavy Guardian armor by just giving up one of my shotgun batteries or grenades, which is still an extremely comfortable loadout to me. I don't feel like I had to choose anything. I don't really even know what I could possibly want this soldier to carry more of. On a soldier who has actual high strength, I'm just like, "I guess the tactical module is extremely overweighted for its benefit, but I might as well take one? Or load up with an absurd amount of ammo and grenades that I'll never really have to use?" Consider the arithmetic at play as well. I can put 9 soldiers in a Skyhawk. Supposing each soldier is very average, like Luke Stewart, that means I can do 9 flashbangs, 9 smokes, destroy cover 9 times in a mission, on average, and everyone still has heavy armor, shotguns or rifles or sniper rifles and ammo to go around. In a typical UFO downing, I'm only fighting about 8-10 aliens, as far as I've seen. Of course, there are also missions with more enemies, like if I wanted to do the Cleaner base, or a terror mission, but then again, I can also easily get soldiers way stronger than Luke Stewart without losing much in the other categories. Isn't it kind of excessive to allow players to have the resources to flash, smoke, strip cover, AND then shoot for every single alien on a typical mission? And I'd challenge anyone else to give the practical arithmetic a legitimate try. Go into a new month in your current game, open up your recruitment screen of fresh soldiers, and then try out what loadouts some of these guys can carry. Ask yourself what, even, you are missing out on when you have soldiers you are likely to actually recruit, that you would want a particularly strong soldier. Perhaps I am actually inclined to agree with Grobobobo - soldiers have too much stats and improve too quickly in general. I also think it is way too easy to recruit supersoldiers because either soldier stats are starting too high (or the way they are rolled is allowing too high of a ceiling) or players are simply offered too many soldiers to recruit from at the start of a month. When you give me 17 soldiers to recruit from at the top of the month, I'm going to pick the three or four who bear a striking resemblance to Harrison Bergeron or Roboute Guilliman, and that's filling like a third to a half of a Skyhawk's worth of soldiers. But besides there just being too much strength so that each soldier can carry too much stuff, I'd say the more foundational design problem is the basic way that strength is used in the game When you imagine building up your Squad, your Team, your plucky band of brothers and sisters who will stand up against the alien threat go from a ragtag team of privates who will be forged into a coordinated platoon... do you imagine that The Big Guy is there to hold a lot of grenades and spare ammo clips? Is that what's cool about The Big Guy? On the topic of air combat: On the topic of Sidewinders, I've shot them at Scouts and Destroyers using an Angel armed with one Autocannon or one Accelerated Cannon and one Sidewinder. I understand that Sidewinders are cheaper to equip than cannons, and it's pretty inconvenient to bring an angel with two cannons because you'd have to give up holding anything else... but the Sidewinders still really feel like throwing a bag of crap at a barn door. Perhaps, since I'm also disappointed by the Laser Lance (it just has to weigh 6 so that an Angel can't carry 2 :x), so maybe the real problem is that the cannons are too strong... but they don't feel too strong when you then balance them against the UFOs they'll be fighting. As for the randomness in air combat, I gotta admit, I was not aware that it actually did have damage rolls. Good to know. I'll play a bit more and then report back on the feel of it. This might also be a separate topic, and I don't feel up to making a big post about it at the moment, but customizing your interceptors also feels like there aren't realistically that many choices, and the choices don't realistically represent that much difference in play. It's *really bad* with Angels, and perhaps that's a good thing because it's the early game jet and should not need to be overly complex to work with, but I don't think the Phantoms feel super customizable, either. I might make a big separate post about this later. On the topic of stuff that don't feel good (like heavy armor togglable): I did a bit of soul-searching, and I think it might also be worthwhile to consider this as a problem of the game in this Milestone as it is. It is good, in a complex and sadistic game like Xenonauts 2, to show players increasing complexity and give them increasingly complex problems to solve over time. It's like a way to tell players, "you thought you were good at this game? No, you're actually not, haha." You present a new challenge this way, it's like the players got a new challenge to try to handle. For your veteran early access testers, inhouse developer testers, and such, who have played Xenonauts 1, Microprose Xcoms, FiraXcoms, and such, we are somewhat dulled to sensing this, and we tend to want all the complexity of the game in the beginning, right away, because we've already been jaded not by their early games, but by their endgames. We tend not to mind that there are a lot of things to learn in the early game, but for new players, the gameplay doesn't evolve as it goes on, and they may tend to feel the game is boring in the beginning if there are not so many options. Consider this progression in Milestone 1: You start with unarmored soldiers who can hold a bunch of stuff. As much stuff as you want, really. You don't really have to decide what consumables or modules to use. Then, as you research armor, it can be extremely heavy, and you start having to ask yourself what tricks you can do without and have to ditch. The light armors, on the other hand, like the Stalker armor, can also add to complexity by being kinda weird and thus forcing you to play different soldiers in different styles. As you research, you also get introduced to stun mechanics later in the game and it gives you another option for approaching aliens with a new risk/reward consideration. And you might want to mix and match armors so you consider which soldiers are your heavy soldiers, which are your light, so that you even start to have deeper consideration about soldier stats when you hire. In Milestone 2, a lot of this sense of progression and increasing complexity has been cut out. You start out with stun baton (the superior method of stunning, in my opinion), so that complexity has been front-loaded rather than letting players feel like it's part of progression. The complexity of choosing heavier and lighter armors to research has been stripped out for a bunch of reasons as we've discussed. It just kinda feels like the armor come in tiers that are straight upgrades now, at least in that early to early-midgame with Defender to Warden to Guardian. And I think part of my antipathy toward the demolition charges is, as Chris says, the Demolition charge is a very versatile and powerful tool that exists from the beginning of the game. Why should such a versatile and powerful tool exist from the beginning of the game? I think it'd be cooler for you to progress into it. Or maybe progress into some of the other powerful and versatile tools, like flashbangs, smoke, and such. As I said, I haven't played all the way through yet (I'm still only at about day 100, having had work today). Maybe the game really blossoms open in the late game, as it did in Milestone 1, when I last played. But isn't it also bad if a player played for the first 100 days and reports that it feels like the game doesn't really change over those days?

That would be an incredibly unfun way to "gotcha" the players after a mission.

Alright, I just played Milestone 2 for a bit. I haven't gotten extremely far, and am on Veteran difficulty, but I wanted to put down some of my thoughts before I go any further. I haven't read anything on any forum yet, to keep my opinion pure. First, these are some reactions and simple points: - I like that the cleaners are now the designated early game enemy. They are sort of average/bad at everything, and that helps players to learn the basic functions and tactics in the game. - I don't know if the Sebilians and Sectons/Psyons have been made stronger, but they feel good to fight at the time you actually fight them. The first mission where I was sweating was an abduction against Sectons/Psyons, and the Sebilians having a relatively big hp pool for a game that is usually rocket tag is good for putting that fear into the people encountering them for the first time. - Allowing you to equip Cleaner SMGs feel silly. If the Xenonauts wanted SMGs of their own, surely they'd have an in-house version. - Starting with Stun Batons makes the technology you research for getting stun guns really unsatisfying, as it just gives you a sidegrade to a basic piece of equipment. Perhaps the techs could be rejiggered so that you start with stun batons and stun guns, but then you have to research the ability to imprison aliens. Without that research, aliens you stun are simply killed and given to you as corpses after the mission. You could also make the starter stun weapons at the beginning of the campaign weaker, and then have a research later to upgrade them into practical weapons against tougher enemies, or even have this research required to allow the stun weapons to deal EMP damage against robotic enemies. - Having rebreathers unlocked at the beginning of the game is suitably ominous. - Sidewinder Missiles feel terrible. They barely scratch the paint on the smallest of alien craft and you end up having to engage with the cannon anyway. - Aircraft equipment should show their weight and hardpoints requirements in the engineering screen. - Overall, the game feels like it's in a better state than it used to be, mostly because of the insertion of the Cleaners into the early game, making actual aliens feel scarier and more exotic. - The game still fails to hurt you for losing soldiers. I'd still raise the difficulty of finding and hiring good soldiers, possibly by lowering the number of new recruits you are presented at the hiring screen, so you're less likely to encounter soldiers with godly stats, or raise again the cost of each soldier. I also want to discuss some more in-depth problems and solutions, or just things that might make the game better, but are outside the current scope of the game. Armor/Strength/Consumables feel bad. The toggle to make armor heavy... eh, I'm not into it. It feels too convenient for a game with a significant amount of bean-counting, where being prepared feels good. But I think the problem here should be solved as a part of a bigger system of problems that stems from the fact that strength is not working as it should. The fantasy of the stat strength, at least in the original Xcom and Terror from the Deeps, is that you usually have soldiers who are good at shooting things, or running fast, or having reflexes, or surviving being shot at, but then you also need some soldiers who are the big strong guys because they can carry more gear. Well, if you look at the gear... 1. Heavy weapons are unnecessary or outright suck. You can go a whole game without using a single machine gun or grenade launcher and not feel like you missed out. 2. Heavy armor is such a great benefit, you'd want to have the heavy armor over just about any other thing, so the fantasy that Xenonauts 2 actually puts on strength is that a strong soldier can have more consumables, which is kinda lame. There are many ways to solve this issue, but here are some ideas of mine: 1. Heavy weapons should be desirable and necessary. Yes, the HEVY launcher blows up cover, puts smoke from afar, and is neat to have, but soldiers can also throw grenades that do both those things, and pretty standard rifles/shotguns also do perfectly fine at killing aliens. Yes, the Machine Guns are good at suppression, but soldiers can also throw stun grenades. You actually have a balance problem not between the heavy weapons and other guns, but between heavy weapons and grenades because it's far better to have your soldiers carry grenades than assign team members to be heavy weapons. The way I see it, grenades should be heavier or require a tech burden (starting out with fragmentation grenades is fine and possibly smoke, but maybe you need to research for flashbangs and demolition charges) or require a cost to build (make people have to pay for and build grenades so you feel that is hurting you for each one you throw). The heavy weapons themselves could also be better. You can let machine guns have an option to take a normal shot or something. I feel like the balance consideration for machine guns has been that they're not very flexible for just shooting and killing aliens, when the balance consideration has already been that the machine gun is very heavy and... hey, rifles kill aliens just fine so once you kill them, you don't need to suppress them. 2. Perhaps what would be needed to make the heavy weapons desirable and necessary is to give the enemies vehicles that are hard to defeat with small arms. The fantasy of a rocket launcher, after all, is having to use it to blow up a tank. Now when I say "tank," I don't necessarily mean a literal tank, but it could be like a big alien, or a big alien machine. I think about the Cleaner base and its turrets, which were pretty hard to crack. The first alien tanks that you meet should show up quite early to teach you to bring heavy weapons in some proportion very early, and perhaps be somewhat like a paper tiger in that they seem strong in a very specialized situation, but it is possibly simple to play around them. What about a "Rover" as a big metal vehicle which is actually a scientific surveying machine rather than a war machine. It is tough and it has a laser cutting tool (like the flying probes) that will deal a lot of damage and probably destroy cover or annihilate soldiers in one shot and is extremely accurate, but it requires a turn to acquire a target before it fires. Thus, a soldier that has been targeted should move behind plenty of cover to absorb the blow before the laser fires on the next turn. The point of this enemy isn't so much to kill players as to teach players that there are certain enemies that you will take forever to kill unless you apply heavy weapons. You could also have a tank that is a big, slow alien with a big gun strapped to it, but no ability to take reflex shots (or perhaps only takes them using a smaller, one-shotting gun). It cannot take reaction shots, so it teaches players to think about where their soldiers end their turns more. By the time the midgame rolls around, you can have legitimate alien tanks that aren't at all paper tigers, as we do now. 3. Kneecap nerf or eliminate the throwable demolition charges. C4, which is much harder to use, is already a way to demolish walls, and so are HEVY rounds. If stripping cover is to be a big part of the gameplay, let it be that most soldiers cannot strip cover conveniently, so you need to have a legitimate vehicle (which I currently don't research or build) to do that or a soldier carrying an otherwise heavy and impractical weapon. 4. Just make more armor types. I was considering how in the patch notes it says that the option to toggle if you want a heavy version of an armor existed because it'd feel bad to research a new armor type and then find that your soldiers aren't strong enough to wear it. Well, why wouldn't the research description just say whether you're researching a heavy or light armor, and then why not just make there be multiple types of armor at every tier so you can choose what type of enhancement for your soldiers you want earlier? Air Combat is too deterministic A lot of people complain that Xcom-likes, such as Xenonauts 2, are too random. But I think us actual Xenonauts 2 enjoyers will say the randomness is part of the charm. That's why it's kinda weird to me that the air combat is so deterministic. Weapons deal exact amounts of damage, the specific tactic you employ will either always defeat the specific enemy or never. I know that air combat hasn't been balanced yet and is still much rougher than ground combat in terms of the time and thought devs put into it, but when the time comes, I strongly believe air weapons should hit or miss, roll for damage, and that the air game should be made more random. In fact, if you took the air combat or the ground combat in Xenonauts 2, it'd even be preferable that the air combat was MORE random than the ground combat because the game is actually only really won and lost in the air and air combat represents a much bigger amount of player investment in terms of the money/resources you need to research and build aircraft weapons, aircraft, hangers, and such. Because air combat is so deterministic, players find themselves railroaded to feeling forced to have certain technologies at certain points in progression because they will either down the alien aircraft and keep being able to play, or fail to, and have to roll over and let the aliens do whatever they want. When there is more randomness in air combat, then players will not feel the need to have air combat technologies/weapons while feeling it is possible to skimp out on certain ground combat technologies/weapons. As new alien ships show you, right now you are likely to say "we can down this just like the previous ship" or "we can't down this, avoid this." But instead, I want players to feel more like "I can down this tough ship, but that may cause my interceptor to need to be repaired for a long time and I'd miss subsequent ships. Do I down this ship and roll the die on it being a good battle for me, or do I skip it and hope a less formidable ship comes by, or I get some other opportunity to make money/get alenium/show funding countries I'm not messing around/disrupt alien activity/etc."

Yes, exactly. Double down on complexity, but make the complexity matter. Meh. This thread isn't meant to be about comparing accelerated weapons and laser weapons - there are plenty of other threads for that. Plenty. I don't care that much about current balance because this thread is about future balance.

I didn't really mean that cleaners should be particularly heavily equipped, especially at the start of the game, but rather that they should have mechanics associated with them that feel proactive, like they are actors who have agency on the world map instead of sitting there and waiting for you to do their special missions.

A point of difference between laser and accelerated weapons is that accelerated weapons have a bit of armor penetration and lasers have a bit more Armor destruction. And I can't work out why it matters. Let's say there's some alien with a lot of armor, like a Mentarch. How do I defeat a Mentarch? Well, I could destroy its armor and then kill it with a laser. I could also penetrate its armor and kill it with an accelerated weapon. So what's the point of both stats existing if they do not imply separate use cases? And then after the point in the tech tree with lasers and accelerated weapons, gauss weapons and the upcoming fusion weapons seem like they are hierarchal. Gauss weapons are meant to be better than both laser and accelerated, and then fusion will be meant to be better than gauss. There is, then, no point in stats to differentiate weapons. If you wanted to, you could kinda just roll armor penetration and armor destruction into a single stat and be done with it. Or you could even eliminate anti-armor stats entirely and the game would kinda feel the same as currently. But instead, I'd double down on complexity. Here's a proposal for how weapons should work: Tier 1 is ballistic weapons and they are basically the worst at everything, but they kill Sectons, Psyons, early game Cleaners, and Sebilians just fine. Mentarchs are pretty dicey because of their high armor. Tier 2 is accelerated weapons and laser weapons. There is already pretty good differentiation between accelerated and laser weapons in their other criteria, such as laser weapons' ease of use and terrain destruction while accelerated weapons have better ammo capacity but is out-of-the-way in research. Both weapon types should be good against armor (moreso than currently) for the purpose of defeating Mentarchs, which start to appear, and accelerated weapons achieve this by having a decent penetration stat (as they currently do) and lasers achieve this by having a good armor destruction stat (as they currently do). Players are to be pushed to move on from Ballistic to Accelerated and Laser weapons (moreso than they are right now) to be able to fight Mentarchs without taking casualties. There is, after all, usually one Mentarch per crash site. Tier 2.5 is stun weapons, and is used to capture aliens and later on to efficiently defeat Robotic enemies. Tier 3 is Gauss, but Gauss itself gets split up between Gauss weapons that shoots a solid ammunition (shotgun, sniper rifle, machine gun) that is very strong at dealing damage but doesn't have particularly good armor-destroying or penetrating capability and other Gauss weapons (rifle, pistol) that shoot a specialized ammunition that for some ginned up in-lore reason, is very destructive to armor, but is not particularly good in some other aspect, like maybe give a penalty to accuracy or costs more TU to fire or doesn't do as much of just normal damage. Then you'll roughly calibrate it so a new role for primary alien species (Sebilians, Psyons, etc.) should show up about a bit before players have Gauss weapons called "Shock Troopers," and they wear heavier armor than their brethren (perhaps at a cost of something else, or just to be mean and screw with players). The idea here is that you need the Gauss weapons to challenge Shock Troopers the same way you needed accelerated and laser weapons to challenge Mentarchs, but now Shock Troopers appear in way greater proportion than Mentarchs. You need to coordinate between different types of soldiers carrying specialized weapons to destroy Shock Troopers' armor and kill them. At this point, players should need to phase out accelerated weapons because their amount of armor penetration should no longer really be cutting it against Shock Troopers (though they are still useful against alien soldiers and support roles), but if you didn't have armor-destroying Gauss weapons, laser weapons will still give you a bit of a mediocre performance against Shock Troopers, though no better than non-specialized Gauss. Tier 4 is Fusion weapons and Fusion weapons are all better at everything than Gauss weapons except a small percentage of aliens will now show up with energy shields that hard counter Fusion weapons. They take greatly reduced damage "thermal" damage type (literally, I want something like -75% damage) which Fusion shares with Laser. So yes, you would want a lot of Fusion weapons to have the best weapon type available to kill most aliens, but you should probably not kit out ALL of your soldiers with Fusion weapons because then you're vulnerable to aliens with energy shields. To get away from specifics, here are the takeaways for the proposal: Weapons come in 4 tiers and each tier is an advantage over the tier before. As you tech up and increase in tiers, different tiers demand different strategies and punish players more and more severely for failing to meet those demands. The higher tech you go, the more weapons have specialized roles and the more you need to mix and match soldiers and even weapons from different tech levels.

I don't know what the specifics should be, about whether healing should be limited or heavy or have trade-offs or anything, but I just think it'd be more interesting if it was not so possible for every soldier to be able to bring their own healing.

I am definitely in favor of a Reaper buff.