Skitso

There's even a medal that is awarded for soldiers that survive a mission where more than half of your units die.

Don't worry. These little stories inside the game are what makes it so memorable. Tough situations where you lose a lot of good soldiers, but you still somehow manage to push through against the odds, are some of the finest gaming moments for me.

While the game is slow and turn based, the combat situation that it simulates is not. If you imagine each turn being a few seconds slice of a chaotic combat situation where soldiers and aliens run around, shooting and dodging, it's much easier to understand misses even from adjacent tiles. Accept that especially your early game units and their equipment suck against unknown extraterrestrial enemies and many of them will die. It's how these games are, and you'll get your payback later.

In xcom styled games, it's completely normal and even expected to lose few soldiers in every battle. They are MUCH more expendable than, say, in Jagged Aliance. So that is probably the reason you feel the game is too difficult while iit really isn't. New reqruits cost almost nothing.

It should be easy enough to add reinforcement difficulty as an option at the beginning of the game: Default (as it is now) +1 turn to arrive +2 turns to arrive and longer intervals +3 turns turns to arrive, longer intervals and fewer units

Dunno. Don't have such.

Exactly. After Cleaner cells, the whole difficulty curve goes all wrong. And it's not just the cleaner HQ, but pretty much every mission going from there feels way too easy. Sebillians are too easy compared to other alien races and all alien races feel too easy compared to cleaners that are super accurate for an early game enemy type.

New recruits get good a bit too fast IMO. While the original crew is suffering from diminishing returns, these new rookies gain abilities so fast they are soon as good as the best veterans. Maybe slow the training rate a little and restrict stat improving to just TU, STR, ACC and REF?

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What if the dropship storage was something that needs to be manufactured and then it would be available in your soldier list the same way as MARS. Then you could replace one soldier (or wehicle?) with it and equip how you please.

Those damaged gray walls are probably completely destroyed as the cleaner unit killed him through the wall.

Base radar circle slightly switches it's color (almost) every day at midnight.

Raided an observer: Had one sebillian on 1st floor, 0 on 2nd floor and 1 seb + 1 mentarch on 3rd. Yeah, most of the crew must have been killed on crash, but still - even doubling that would feel too low.

Yeah, I understand there needs to be distinction between shroud and revealed areas for obvious gameplay reasons. The illustration I made was just to sell the idea. As it is now, the difference in brightness is huge and tweaking a big darker might give some visual benefit. Fair enough.

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There was a discussion about night missions on Xenonauts' Discord channel and I think it's a discussion better had here at the forums. I feel nights are not dark or scary enough as they are now and the game utilizes dark conditions way too little. About the visuals: Here's a quick Photoshop where the left is how it is now and the right one is my edit which, granted, looks quite bad too, but maybe you get the idea what I'm after: Also, we could try to think of different ideas how to force players to play more night missions or missions in dark conditions. My ideas: Crash sites and other missions could be available for shorter time Some missions could be available only at night (landing ship waits at the location until it's night time) Alien bases could be played with night rules (do aliens need lights?) UFO interiors could be played with night rules (do aliens need lights?) Some missions could have significantly fewer enemies at night to encourage night time operations 2 part mission where the second part is at night no matter when it's started

Now with my latest playthrough, continuing my random thoughts from my post above... I'm now a bit further than what I've usually played at day ~140 and the topmost feeling is still that the game's intensity and feeling of progression plateaus after the Cleaner sub plot is resolved. Things start to pickup only after first Alien Base is revealed and abductor UFO's start to appear (at day ~130-140?). What I think generates this feeling comes to few reasons: UFO waves are too weak/far and in between around 90-120 days Not enough terror missions. No new UFO types are introduced Lack of special "scripted" missions after Cleaner HQ mission Lack of Scripted conversation cut-scenes. To keep them coming, It might be a good idea to add one for each new UFO class observation and mission type (Terror, Alien Base etc.) Quick question about terror missions and alien bases @Chris: at what point earliest should they start spawning? If I have very good air superiority, how many and how often should they spawn?

If I bind camera level to mouse wheel and camera zoom to ctrl+wheel, trying to zoom still just controls camera level.

@Chris Clearing the main control room in alien bases revealed the whole map in X1 to help hunting down the last roaming aliens. Should we have similar functionality in X2 too? Doesn't seem to work in Cleaner HQ at least. I really wish night missions were a lot darker. In original XCOM the FOV faded into complete black and it created super tense atmosphere there. In Xenonauts 2, even the last visible tile of the unit's FOV is relatively bright. The area outside of the FOV is also very bright and doesn't even look that different compared to day missions. Night time could also benefit from a slight blue color grading / pallette switch for added mood. Underground missions would benefit visually from a slight FOV brightness fade instead of flat lighting they have now. Similar to night missions but with lesser effect. Would look and feel more like it's not under the sun. I'm not getting enough information on what interceptors and aircraft weapons I should use against different UFO's. Is it meant to be just trial and error? I mean I have for example both sidewinders and torpedoes from day one and if I'm auto resolving everything, it's really hard to understand each weapons niche. Could we still push lasers a bit further to give magnetic weapons more room? Footsteps are removed after certain time. I understand this is done for performance reasons. However, persistent (for couple of turns even) footsteps would be a nice gameplay element for tracking enemies Reapers are currently pretty much good for nothing. No threat whatsoever. Upcoming AI overhaul probably helps it's swarming tactics, but I'm not sure it's enough. Maybe add "fast mover" trait that gives like -50% hit chance or something. Or add more of them and make them bunch together. To add a sense of threat from the cleaners at the beginning of the game, they could maybe do a small scale scripted base attack to also introduce that game mechanic to new players.

Got few more ideas: Dark nights: on/off - make night missions extra tense. Fov visuals fade to black like in original xcom and view cones are reduced even more Dark alien bases: on/off - Cleaner and alien bases are played with night rules/visuals. Why not ufo interiors too? Invasion escalation speed: slow/normal/fast - self explanatory Base attack ufo aggression: off/low/normal/high - sets how fast, determined, strong and well escorted the base attack ufo's are.

Is Xeno1 styled research that allows multiple simultaneous projects out of the question? I realize it requires extra coding and UI changes, but I just loved how that worked in the first game.

i I've been criticizing the same thing in my "random thoughts about the game" thread. Last time I played a bit further into the game, Endgame was closing up just when it felt like I was just pushing into mid game. Last mission came available and the game was still introducing new UFO types, research topics, aliens etc.. @Chris should add new steps and missions to really pad up the length and add large scale epicness to the latter half of the conflict. When all the content is already there, it should be relatively fast/cheap to add enough content and make the game really feel epic. I personally don't feel these kinds of games can easily feel too long as long as the game is able to introduce new and interesting stuff periodically and invasion progresses steadily. Also hate if the research tree is so back loaded I get the feeling I don't have enough time to enjoy my latest gadgets that could give nice gameplay variations if I just had the time to play with them. Alien bases could use same style of progression mechanics as Cleaner bases and have tougher final large alien base be revealed after few smaller ones. We could also have one or two more terror missions across the whole campaign IMO. Game also needs same kind on scripted "main missions" as early Cleaner missions in the mid and late game too. One important thing for me at least is that I'd like to be able to play multiple missions/crash sites with the final ultimate gear. Many games stumble with their campaigns at the last possible moment and fail in this simple but important thing: when I'm finally able to equip my team with the best possible endgame gear after long and hard campaign, I'd like to be able to enjoy them in more than one final mission.

We actually had such a talk with Goldhawk (thank you @Chris for giving the opportunity!) this spring, but I soon realised that it requires so much time and effort that I simply couldn't manage it in my current life/work/family situation any more. :/

Now that @Chris has published the official development roadmap for the early access period and one of Goldhawk's bullet points being "additional tactical maps", I think it's time to bring this topic into discussion again. I am the author of the highly appraised Skitso's ultimate map pack for Xenonauts 1 that had thousands of downloads back in the day so one might say I know what I'm talking about. While many of the game's current maps are fine, there's a lot to make them better. The list I've made in the first post above has it all so I'm not going to repeat myself here. Just saying... the game needs more than just a lot more tactical maps. Many of the current ones need some improvements too. Biggest map issues are: Many maps feel too empty/sterile/not lived in Not enough verticality (!!!) Layout variation within a single biome is too homogenous: Farm biome is too formulaic and boring with the same crossing roads and hedges over and over again Jungles aren't dense enough and ancient temples in each is an odd design choice Deserts of the world are all full of construction yards And additionally, crash sites need to feel like crash sites. So smoke, fire, broken stuff and debris around and inside the wreck what about you guys and gals, what you feel the game is missing mapping wise?