Solver

I'm also interested in how it's actually possible to get to the final mission without being ready for it. The final mission requires a captured Praetor. That means at least one successful raid on a Battleship or an alien fortress. You can't really manage that without a team of experienced soldiers and good gear. And you don't even get to see Battleships unless you've developed some decent tactics - if your tactics are subpar, then I think Landing Ships is where you lose the game.

This is an interesting perspective, since I would have the opposite complaint about the final mission. It's too easy. It's easier than some other late-game missions (Carriers, Battleships, the largest alien bases), and to me the Xenonauts final mission has usually felt like a show of your own superiority. That's as long as you have end-game gear. Enemies are clustered close together, a singularity cannon can wipe out most of each cluster, and magstorms finish off the rest. If you have a full team of soldiers with mixed Predator/Sentinel armor, a couple of Singularity cannons and mag weapons for everyone else, it's pure dominance.

No. The launcher isn't just for show, it does things like processing your mod list and figuring out what files the game will use. There's no support for skipping the launcher.

I haven't played V7 yet, but from the description and the visuals, a few points. The overall layout seems much improved. It should mostly address the previous dropship's main problem of being very exposed. It might be nice to have a bit of empty space also to allow for more movement initially. The frontmost two soldiers should perhaps be a tile away from the ramp and not directly in front of it. Or consider making the side doors be a 1-tile corridor, so a soldiers steps through one tile on the way out. The sides should in my opinion be either completely solid (like X1 Charlie), or if they have windows like now, then the windows should be breakable (though probably not too easily). Indestructible windows are not immersive, and are inconsistent with the rest of the game. I really don't like the idea of increasing it to 10 soldiers. Let that be an upgrade, the starting dropship being 8 soldiers is more than fine. Increasing it to 10 means a 25% increase in your firepower, which doesn't feel remotely necessary based on V6, and I don't think the game calls for an increased number of enemies to compensate either. 8 soldiers has always felt like a sweet spot for early missions in terms of unit management as well - I remember that some pre-release X1 builds tried 6 and 10, and both of those options definitely felt worse than 8.

There's no such hard limit from a quick reading of the psionic attack source file. Although come to think of it, I forgot to check one layer up, whether the psionic behavior can be triggered at all a second time, I'll do that later.

There's a limit of each ability being used once per turn. So a Praetor would only do Fear once per turn, for instance. And the only types of attack that work are mind control, hallucinate, fear and dread.

So this is a couple of months overdue probably, but here's a small announcement. Given the current status of Xenonauts, and of X:CE, I currently have no plans to release additional versions of X:CE. The possibility is still there for other people to work on X:CE, but from my perspective X:CE 0.35 will likely remain the final version.

I think there is still no official news on other platforms. However, I've been playing the latest beta builds on Linux, and everything works very well. Hopefully nothing is going to break that compatibility.

I think you might need to be careful with the random elements, and with the subjective feeling that players get in the game. It's important for bravery to feel like it matters. A lesson from X1 - it shipped with psionics not working as intended, that is, bravery was mostly meaningless and psionics were resolved with a random roll, only marginally affected by bravery. Many players complained about psionics feeling wrong but that bug went undiscovered for a few years, and resulted in the game just feeling subtly wrong in that regard.

It was possible in the original game, but X:CE solved some technical issues that could crop up with too much fire and destruction.

Yup. Maybe getting a bit off topic here, but I think Oblivion's horrible VA wasn't so much because the actors were bad (though some were IMO), but rather because there were so few voices. When every Orc in the game has the same voice, it's immersion-breaking. And that leads to the conclusion that quality VA is costly. If I imagine VA in Xenonauts, the idea is fine, but if the game only had 1 male and 1 female soldier voice, it would just detract from the atmosphere. Goldhawk is obviously a small studio, and while I'm sure they could record a few lines, they just couldn't afford VA that's even halfway immersive. Overall I really think X1 had a great amount of character for such a low-budget game. The art had a distinct style, the Chief Scientist was a great snarky character - a major writing achievement since the game's text was almost entirely research reports - and the soundtrack was pretty great. The visual design of aliens is the only major flaw of X1 atmosphere-wise.

With regards to voice acting, I'd much rather have no voice acting than poorly done voice acting (I'm traumatized by Oblivion), but I expect that technical support for voice acting could be added by X2:CE, thus potentially allowing voice mods.

Could be anything of course, but I've fixed a bug that had similar symptoms in X1, and that was caused by a soldier trying to reaction fire (i.e. scoring a successful reaction check) but being unable to do so, such as having an empty mag.

I agree. The general recharging design is probably good, but a 3-shot cell isn't. One more possibility is to delay the recharge - instead of recharging 1 shot per turn, make lasers only recharge if they were not fired in the preceding turn.

Laser weapons - they're supposed to be limited in ammo due to the recharge mechanic, which I don't think works well now. They recharge every turn. A laser rifle has 5 ammo, so if you shoot 2 aimed shots per turn, you can still afford to do it for 5 turns. If you do a burst + normal, the next turn will still see you at 2/5 ammo, allowing two shots. Given that it's common enough to spend a turn repositioning with no targets in sight, I don't feel like lasers are severely limited by their low ammo now, which they are meant to be.

I can also confirm encountering this.

Oh, I had not made any connection between Mind War and mind control. I had mostly seen the effects of Mind War dissipate. Now I feel stupid.

So one old, familiar balance issue - mind control is currently instant. That doesn't work well. It's not balanced, and more importantly, it does not feel fun or reasonable. One soldier that gets taken over is very likely to kill one teammate immediately, perhaps two. We've been through this with X1, where basically everyone hated mind control working like that, and it had to be changed in a patch.

Me too I don't currently have a system that can debug the game though... Just one more thing before you start a new game, could you the script again, but with UnlockFinalMission();

I have no capability to test anymore, but that should work... you might need to delete the internal script cache. Check assets/mods/internal (Delete the whole thing if it exists) and also %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Goldhawk Interactive\Xenonauts\internal

True, but that's basically a cheat button at this point as it seems to always win with no damage taken, and autoresolve isn't what normal air combat is supposed to be like.

Possible balance issue with planes - repair takes forever. As someone who isn't great at air combat, I withdrew a fighter with 10 HP from an Observer, and it seems to be taking something like 15 or more days to repair. Very slow.

During a ground combat mission, something went wrong and black tiles would no longer be revealed as I moved to get vision of them. I saved and re-loaded that save, upon which the problematic tiles became visible, but one Wraith seems to have become a "ghost". Load the save and note how the Wraith won't be targeted, that is, the target cursor doesn't appear when moving over that Wraith. Force-firing also seems to target the ground tile and not the alien. The alien is still there though, and can be hit by splash damage. gc2.json

I realized the floor thing later, it's definitely confusing how visually the floor is above the ground but is ground-level mechanically. What's going on with walking through walls though, as in my second post here? Also the inner light-coloured walls can be walked through, like in the first screenshot that inner wall separating a smaller room, you can just walk through the wall from the bigger room.

Weird indeed, the save file does have the right prerequisties. How about you edit assets/scripts/gamescreen.lua in the game's folder and add this to the end? UnlockResearch("Researches.OperationEndgame");