Solver

I've played X2 on Linux, via Proton, from the earliest builds to release version. No problem, runs very well. Proton has come very far, these days I would seriously defend the assertion that Linux runs games better than on Windows, if you exclude games that make use of kernel-level drivers for anti-cheat or such.

Congratulations on the release, and best of luck! I hope the game is as successful as it deserves to be, it's been a pleasure and a privilege to watch it develop and mature.

Just got an idea. One minor thing that bothers me, there's little incentive to capture more aliens alive. Which is also a complaint I had about the original X-Com. Capturing one alien of each type is good for the observation bonus but there really isn't any reason to attempt more captures. The slight money increase doesn't warrant the extra risk. Let additional live aliens provide some extra OPs. It's a versatile currency that's hard to generate on demand, so some OPs as a possible reward for live captures would be a situationally interesting incentive.

I think it's a really good highlight too of what sets X2 apart from other current games in the genre. X2 maintains the original X-Com spirit where losses are expected and things can go bad quickly. A lucky alien shot, an unlucky miss from your sniper and suddenly you're this close to massive losses. But in this game, that's acceptable and recoverable. I know many players will restart a mission (or quit) if it goes really bad, but a failed mission or a lost base is totally recoverable in X2. Most other games have more guardrails against these situations. But X2 fixes the "totally bullshit" cases from the original X-Com (unavoidable blaster bomb straight into the dropship) while maintaining the spirit. For what it's worth I was blowing enough holes in roofs without demo charges anyway. I had regular fusion grenades blow holes in roofs, as well as rockets from the trusty ARES. And yes, it's fun to see aliens fall down into the building, even more fun to then shoot down at them from the roof. Demo charges would I assume blow bigger holes but normal fusion explosives do it anyway. At the same time by the endgame demo charges just take up too much space. With all the fancy modules and equipment available, backpack space is quite valuable.

Took me some three weeks but I just finished, for the first time, a full campaign in the game. Milestone 7 is stable enough that I only had minor issues with the latest builds, great progress compared to earlier milestones where I'd run into some blockers before getting to the endgame. Here's some unorganized thoughts from the playthrough. Overall, I'm very happy with the game. It's fun, it's satisfying, the pieces fit well together, it's a cohesive great experience. I had a long campaign, kept the UOO missions until the end. So I did UOO Sabotage when I already had Fusion weapons, from there it was a straight sequence of UOO Bridge Assault -> capturing an Eternal -> Endgame. Probably not quite the intended sequence but I was managing panic well enough to let me delay the UOO that much. During this run I had some real setbacks and I love that I could push through and win. I had set up a secondary base with some nice manufacturing and radars, but I lost it. Retaliation UFO coming in, damaged, so it landed not too big of an assault force but I only had a few sentry guns and rookie soldiers guarding the base. Cyberdrones were too much for privates to handle, so I lost the base. Then later, I had a terror mission go sideways. Lots of aliens (I think it might have been the bug that got fixed later), lost two soldiers, saw that ammo might be an issue, had to abort. Still got it in the end. Love the writing and can't get enough of the Chief Scientist. I'm sure some people will find him annoying but he works so well for me. It's as always super satisfying to watch some rookies get lucky and become indispensable. One of my rookies who was pretty bad and was just guarding the dropship area on a cleaner extraction mission got a couple good shots there, luckily survived a few more missions and became one of my best soldiers for the final assault. This is one of the most satisfying things in the game. The early missions with varied objectives are fun, unfortunately they're one-off and later don't happen. One thing I'd love in a DLC would be to randomize this some, even on existing maps. I really like the stage where you have various armors with different tradeoffs. Almost a shame that they all converge into the Vanguard which is just the best in every way. A Stalker-wearing jetpack sniper is a totally different soldier from a Colossus-wearing tank, but by the end it's less varied. I couldn't find a real use for breaching charges in the mid or late game. Early game they're very useful to destroy cover and expose enemies, but once you get Alenium explosives then regular grenades are enough to destroy cover, and lasers also work for that. Even moreso with later tech. Operation Endgame was a massive jump in difficulty even compared to Battleships and UOO Bridge Assault. Lots of aliens, and you have to push forward to destroy the gateways on time, all while trying not to get caught in a crossfire between the heaviest alien units. And that's just the first part, though actually it's harder than the second - part two, there's no time pressure and more cover, you can advance methodically as in an alien base. I appreciated the difficulty, it's worthy of the final mission, but it's probably too much of a jump. Mantids with bio-launchers were surprisingly hard to deal with. Bleeding wounds and then up to three of those bug critters. Ouch. In one of the earlier builds, maybe 7.2, my sodiers were still blowing themselves up with grenades indoors (UFOs, bases). By the current build that finally seems to be fixed, mercifully enough. Of all the psionic units I fought, I had a soldier get mesmerized exactly once. Eternals with their mind control are a threat (and take forever to go down to batons) but mesmerize appeared to be a non-factor. -------------- All in all, congratulations on being almost at the 1.0 release and I very much expect the game to do well. It's a very fun and satisfying take on the X-Com formula and remains different even now that squad based tactical games are more popular.

Same, probably reaction fire related - so ground combat pretty much doesn't work in this version.

I'm not near any saves right now but hopefully this is clear enough anyway. On the UOO1 bridge assault mission, while defending the mainframe I saw three Sebillians run out of right where a destroyed Gateway used to be. I was expecting only the gravlifts and intact gateways would be spawning reinforcements, so this is either a bug or poorly explained during the mission.

That's the sort of bug I would have been tempted to leave in, as a hint the expensive battlesuit is considered more important than the rookie within it.

Very happy that it's save compatible and I'm continuing my 7.2 campaign that was stuck due to CTDs.

After completing an alien abduction mission, something broke in the geoscape. Bringing up the engineering screen in the base crashes the game. bug_report_2026-02-22-23h54_st_7.2.0_unhandled_exception_0.zip

No, that's just a translation for the mod that's included with X:CE. It does nothing usually, unless you also install Fire in the Hole and play in French.

I'll have to agree that the tread has served its purpose. The requested change has been made and the recent series of posts here is anything but constructive, so a lock it is.

I've been playing the Milestone builds, and of course I'd played a fair bit of earlier builds, but the Milestone builds do feel much more mature and are also the first time I've gotten past the early midgame, so it seems like a good time to provide some renewed feedback. I've seen a lot of what others have posted, so I'll omit points that have already been brought up many times unless I have additional insights to share. Mostly staying away from balance, too. All in all, well, I can't stop playing in the evenings and I'm particularly impressed with how much gameplay has improved over X1 thanks to mostly small changes. Cleaners People have said the Cleaner arc is short, and after reading those comments, I understand. They featured more prominently in earlier builds but aren't so visible in the EA build after all. Design-wise, getting rid of the mandatory Cleaner base attack was the right choice, but it can lead to the Cleaners coming out of nowhere seemingly. You attack the Intel Hub without a good background on who they are and then most of their story comes after you eliminate the organisation entirely. I strongly suspect the flow of the Cleaner story can be improved with some fairly minor changes. They should appear in the first mission (the alien research site) alongside aliens. This will create a memorable moment for the player (who are these secret service type guys? why are they attacking me, are they with the aliens?) and provide an opportunity for the appropriate research text to show up early, giving some background. Then the player would be going into the Intel Hub to face a familiar enemy. Especially recovering a Cleaner body from the first mission would make a difference. As things are now, you're almost certain to only get the Cleaner autopsy done after destroying their HQ, because the Intel Hub and the Cells end with you escaping, so you don't recover any bodies unless you drag them yourself. A lot has been said about the difficulty of Cleaner Cells, to the point where it seems a couple negative Steam reviews appeared in frustration at the missions. These two missions aren't unfair to experienced players but they do show up fairly early and can feel unfair to new players. It's pretty undeniable that there is a difficulty spike. The Cells are harder than the Intel Hub or HQ missions, and they're harder than crash sites or even terror missions in that phase of the game. While there's been some focus on the timed reinforcement aspect, I'm not so sure that is the main problem, though of course adjusting reinforcements/timers per difficulty is a good idea. Much of the difficulty of the Cells seems to stem from a high initial enemy count. The Cell Cleaners are tougher than most other enemies in this phase, they have burst weapons and either decent damage or good armour. Removing even one Cleaner from the initial map would go a long way - the Cells don't need radical changes as much as they need fine tuning. The other difficulty component is that you need to locate the VIP. Which is a bit weird with metagaming effects. The first time you play, you need to spread out a bit and look for the VIP. The second time you play, you know where the VIP is so you can follow the optimal tactic of heading straight for the main building, blowing open walls and finishing the VIP off with a MARS rocket salvo or something similarly explosive. In the Cleaner HQ, the objective area should display what boosts you're getting from killing the cells, like "Cleaner Cell destroyed - defender armour weakened". This is as a reminder and as a confirmation to the player of what specifically has been accomplished. Air Combat Since air combat is going to get another pass, I'm not going to go into the actual combat mechanics now but rather some adjacent points. There's a strange metagaming issue with damaged UFOs, which X1 also has. During a UFO wave, as UFOs go in and out of radar range, I can remember if I e.g. destroyed a particular UFO's armour if I remember the ID. I torpedoed UFO-5 so it has no armour any longer? Okay, then the next time I get a contact, I'll know if it's the same one by checking if it's UFO-5 or UFO-6. But it's unclear if I'm supposed to do this. Same issue with UFO types really, if I engaged it and know it's a Destroyer, subsequent clicks will still say Unknown. One fairly straightforward solution could be to remember which UFOs have been engaged by a squadron and, for any such UFO, show its type and perhaps damage status. I can't help but feel that the existence of the Dynamic UFO HP option is weird and suggests an issue. It's very strange for the same UFO to get weaker or tougher depending on how many planes I engage with. No idea what to do with this, but my intuition is that the best balancing tool is fuel. If you're sending three planes where one would do, in theory you should be wasting fuel and thus be in a worse position to respond to a subsequent threat. And related to dynamic HP, I've complained before that the auto-healing of UFOs is very much a black box. Maybe the mechanic has its place but it needs to be more clear. Compared to X1, there's the excellent move of making UFOs occasionally slow down so that it's possible to catch a faster UFO with a slower plane if you get lucky. This makes another mechanic from X1 appear awkward - if your squadron runs out of fuel, they have to go back to base, but they're limited to the lowest-fuel plane. In X1, I didn't mind, but in X2 it really feels like it'd make sense to split squadrons in-flight in such a situation, with e.g. Angels returning to base and Phantoms continuing. Bases and Teching There are a few surprising moments in the tech tree. One example is, if you skip Accelerated Cannon (engineer build) for planes, and go for the much superior Laser Lance, when eventually research Heavy Gauss, you'll see the engineering project to build the Gauss Cannon (whatever it was called) and suddenly discover it needs Accelerated Cannons first. This is surprising because of the inconsistency, normally each weapon tier is independent and also thematically we're building a new type of gun, not upgrading the previous one. Starting a new base, you can assign buildings to be constructed before the access lift is complete. That is a good change but it's not even hinted at anywhere, you have to discover it by accident. The Training Center, along with the whole training mechanic, is too much of a black box. I do see the training capacity but that's all. How fast are my soldiers getting attribute progress? How much has training contributed overall? Which attributes? Are all my soldiers training? I did not find anywhere to see those. Base upgrades (Alenium generators, Quantum labs, etc) may be easy to miss for players who don't expect those. Perhaps a tooltip in the main base view if an upgrade is available? Hover over a generator and it might say "Alenium Generator upgrade available in the Workshop". I find base storage confusing right now. Why are mission items not sold automatically? Not sure if there's still a reason for this. There was in earlier builds but now, unless I'm mistaken, there is no reason ever to hold on to an item you got from a mission. Research unlocks automatically when relevant and items are never used in manufacture. Then the only thing storage adds is confusion potential, exemplified by how "when can I sell Cleaner Data?" is one of the most common progression questions. Combat missions Ground combat, the meat of the game, is of course excellent overall, with significant improvements compared to just a few months ago. I really like the various alien abilities, they feel like a successful return to classic X-Com style, which is probably the main reason combat feels better than earlier this year. A strange thing I noticed is that terror missions feel a lot easier in X2. In X1, I'd always be afraid of them, they were, well, a terror. Just like in the original game. X2 terror missions are easy but I cannot quite figure out why, they're mechanically the same as X1 after all. Some contributing factors could be that aliens always prioritise civilians (making civilians powerful meat shields), that Reaper AI in particular is dumb (they're not sneaky and so are easier to deal with) and that the terror maps have many explosive props (if a gas station shows up, that's almost cheating, a well-placed shot blows the entire area up). Base defence missions are always a highlight for me. Some AI issues clearly present but very good stuff overall, though they could be improved by having a few more interactive props. It's a Xenonaut base, it is the perfect place for that. An explosive gas balloon in the workshop, some equipment in the lab that explodes with EMP damage, a container that starts leaking smoke if damaged in the storage room. The fights would feel more epic plus interactive props are always fun. Also, the Access Lift tile is very uninteresting. Aliens aren't coming from it anyway so ideally I'd give it a complete makeover with a rename to Command Center, but the existing tile could be improved by at adding some sandbags to hide behind. Stun damage is difficult to balance but it's currently not there. I've repeatedly knocked enemies out without meaning to. The general rule that stun bar above HP bar means unconscious is good but some tweaks are needed. One idea is to require an actor to have just received stun damaged to fall unconscious, and disallow unconsciousness on HP damage. This is to prevent a situation where you shoot an alien, not dealing enough damage to kill but enough to knock them out. Being knocked out from a shotgun to the face is weird. Related to stun, stun guns need a clearer role. They're currently fully useless. Miscellany Tutorial tooltips - the overdamage explanation seems to pop up the first time an actor dies via overdamage, which is very likely to be a civilian from alien fire. Should probably be only if you kill via overdamage instead. Yes I tried the tutorial mode. Tutorial tooltips - I cannot figure out what triggers the "adjacent soldiers can open doors" explanation but I got it during the alien turn and that probably shouldn't happen. We need soldier flags back on the UI! Servitors are mostly referred to as gun drones, except the initial research text. Missions with reinforcements could really use a visible timer, like the abduction missions have. Soldiers can path through burning tiles and even kill themselves by doing so. A corner case with laser machine guns. If I fire a 10-round burst and a 3-round burst, that takes my ammo down to 7/30. Then the game won't let me fire a 10-round burst because there's not enough ammo. Makes some sense but I'd prefer to be able to force-fire anyway if I use ctrl. Using a medkit can cause reaction fire, it should probably be exempt. It's highly counterintuitive that winning a terror mission doesn't reduce panic in the region.

It seems that 1.25 has the wrong save location. Go to My Documents\My Games\Xenonauts 2 and copy the Saves folder from there (which has all your saves) to My Documents\My Games\Xenonauts 2-Editor, which is a folder the appears in 1.25. Then I imagine the saves will be visible - this will probably be fixed soon in the builds.

Having also enjoyed Jagged Alliance 2 years ago, the expendability of soldiers is a major difference compared to Xcom series. In the original X-Com, you could have 14 soldiers in the first dropship so a few would die and leave you with enough of a force. In Xenonauts, you have saner amounts of troops but losing 1-2 per mission is completely fine. One Laser Rifle costs as much as five recruits (plus materials). Keep replacing soldiers as you lose them, and you'll end up with a core of excellent veterans who have done multiple missions, they're the valuable ones.