Solver

So per request for more info. Logs are overwritten, but trying to get a sequence of saves. This post-mission save was likely broken already when the mission started because it's a followup to the soldier equip CTD save: From the equipment crash save, I went for a mission right away, so the two saves are in sequence. Now, weirdness1 below is the earliest save I have where stuff got weird. Equipment is acting all weird in it and it can CTD. Accompanying log: weirdness1-output.zip user_weirdness1-17.jsonweirdness1-output.zip Unlikely to be useful, weirdness_ufo_in_air is just before weirdness1 (about to intercept the UFO in Africa) but is also broken, has the same crash. user_weirdness_ufo_in_air-18.json Then here we have weirdness1_earlier, the last working save. It's not long before weirdness_ufo_in_air. This save works, at least I can't make it CTD, and if you forward a few hours then the UFO which features in the other two saves will fly into Africa. user_weirdness1_earlier-19.json Possible hint: a short bit after loading weirdness1_earlier, self-recharge laser research will complete. That causes a lot of equipment stuff to happen automatically that could break something? On the other hand, when the research completes, I still cannot make the save CTD. Could be worth some extra testing though.

Possibly related to the soldier equipment crash I reported. On this save, kill the final alien. The game will load back to Geoscape and present the mission summary, clicking Accept there crashes the game. user_postmissionctd-16.json

Sorry, the kind of bug nobody likes. When I'm loading a late-game (day 200+) tactical combat save, the behavior is non-deterministic. The loading often gets stuck at 16% (loading screen continues to animate), rarely at 1% (screen doesn't animate) and on some other attempts it loads properly. Attached is an example save where I've had the issue, but I've had the problem with other missions as well. user_latesave-15.json

This save has a repeatable CTD for me. Open the armory screen and try changing the armour of any soldier - it crashes. There's also other weird behaviour in the same screen, for example try to select the MARS and change its equipment. Soldier equipment cannot be changed though it doesn't CTD except for armour. An error flashes by when opening the armory screen so something's weird in the game state. Possibly related to jetpacks, I constructed the jetpack upgrade and that might be causing the crashes. equipcrash.json Relevant stack trace: System.NullReferenceException: A fatal error occurred during Update[] - Object reference not set to an instance of an object Context: - Process:global::Artitas.Events.DeltaTimeEvent - DeltaTime Event[dT: 0.0162106] - Process:global::Artitas.Events.DeltaTimeEvent - DeltaTime Event[dT: 0.0164624] - Log:string - Exception in Unity lifecycle, marked as handled: ArgumentException: ItemRequest for: FileSystem::assets/assets/xenonauts/template/strategy/item/aircraft_equipment/torpedo_tier3.json failed because it wasn't attached to an actor or an aircraft. Parameter name: request Xenonauts.Common.Components.Item.GeoBaseItemRequestStrategy.RequestItem [Artitas.Entity request] [at F:/Jenkins/workspace/X2 [Build]/support-0.74.x/Assets/Code/Screens/Common/Components/Item/ItemRequestComponent.cs:186] Xenonauts - Request:global::Artitas.GlobalEntity - GlobalEntity 12390 - Process:global::Strategy.Systems.ProcessItemRequestsCommand - Strategy.Systems.ProcessItemRequestsCommand - Object reference not set to an instance of an object at Code.Screens.Strategy.UI.Components.Armory.ArmoryInventoryController+<IsTileVisible>c__AnonStorey2.<>m__0 (Artitas.Entity otherItem) [0x00011] in F:\Jenkins\workspace\X2 (Build)\support-0.74.x\Assets\Code\Screens\Strategy\UI\Components\Armory\ArmoryInventoryController.cs:238 at System.Linq.Enumerable.Any[Entity] (IEnumerable`1 source, System.Func`2 predicate) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Code.Screens.Strategy.UI.Components.Armory.ArmoryInventoryController.IsTileVisible (Optional`1 availableActors, Artitas.Entity item) [0x00064] in F:\Jenkins\workspace\X2 (Build)\support-0.74.x\Assets\Code\Screens\Strategy\UI\Components\Armory\ArmoryInventoryController.cs:238 at Code.Screens.Strategy.UI.Components.Armory.ArmoryInventoryController.IsItemControllerVisible (Xenonauts.Strategy.UI.Components.Inventory.ArmoryItemController controller) [0x00096] in F:\Jenkins\workspace\X2 (Build)\support-0.74.x\Assets\Code\Screens\Strategy\UI\Components\Armory\ArmoryInventoryController.cs:213 at Common.UI.DataStructures.AUILayoutController`2[Xenonauts.Strategy.UI.Components.Inventory.ArmoryItemController,Artitas.Entity].Filter (Boolean animate) [0x0002e] in F:\Jenkins\workspace\X2 (Build)\support-0.74.x\Assets\Code\Libraries\Common\Code\UI\UIController\AUILayoutController.cs:408 at Code.Screens.Strategy.UI.Components.Armory.ArmoryInventoryController.Refresh (Boolean resetScroll) [0x00008] in F:\Jenkins\workspace\X2 (Build)\support-0.74.x\Assets\Code\Screens\Strategy\UI\Components\Armory\ArmoryInventoryController.cs:201 at Xenonauts.Strategy.UI.SoldierEditorElement.ProcessDeltaTimeReport (Artitas.Events.DeltaTimeEvent report) [0x00084] in F:\Jenkins\workspace\X2 (Build)\support-0.74.x\Assets\Code\Screens\Strategy\UI\Elements\SoldierEditorElement.cs:310 at (wrapper delegate-invoke) System.Func`3<Xenonauts.Strategy.UI.SoldierEditorElement, Artitas.Events.DeltaTimeEvent, UniversalTweenEngine.Timeline>:invoke_Timeline__this___SoldierEditorElement_DeltaTimeEvent (Xenonauts.Strategy.UI.SoldierEditorElement,Artitas.Events.DeltaTimeEvent)

A few almost-final balance thoughts since I'm in the final stages of a campaign. The Advanced Medkit project pretty much sucks. Costs 250k and 20 Sebillian Corpses, which sell for 100k. For a total of 350k, you get a medkit that costs 10 TU instead of 20 TU to use and that's it. Way too weak. Medkits are important but I've rarely been unable to spend the 20 TU and for such an investment, I expected something better. Let them heal more so the soldier gets closer to their max HP? About pacing. This is me in the late game with 26 scientists, so I've built a few extra labs. Note that just these research items - there's more I haven't unlocked and a couple smaller ones down the list - would take 63 days. I'm pretty sure I'm about to hit the time limit without even researching everything. The recharging lasers upgrade is confusing. It automatically upgrades your weapons to advanced laser weapons that self-recharge, but the old ones are still in the manufacture list, so you can build a Laser Rifle or an Advanced Laser Rifle, which leads to the impression you must upgrade manually. The older lasers should probably disappear entirely.

Got an alien who spawned on this tile in a Harvester. My soldier on the left has vision, so there's LOS from that room, but the tile with the alien appears to be in the hull. The Sebillian is stuck in there and there's no firing path from any location.

Just wanted to reiterate this suggestion. It makes sense that leaving the dropship is dangerous in itself, but the way things work now is a bit weird. You should kill any aliens that start right in front of the dropship but other than that, the optimal play on the first turn is just to skip the turn entirely and let aliens move. Then on the second turn, you can leave much more safely, while on the first turn any action has a higher risk of being met with reaction fire from aliens that are off to the sides.

Since this thread ended up having many V24 balance issues, adding another minor one - the airstrike bonus for crashed UFOs doesn't seem to progress, it's always 100k. Which is a good amount of money early on but of course isn't at all worth it later on. UX issue related to money, in X2 much of your money comes from selling stuff captured in missions. In X1, everything was auto-sold so your stores only had items your soldiers could use, in X2 your stores have alien corpses, weapons, etc. This is a potentially dangerous change for new players if they don't realize they can sell stuff. Without changing the gameplay mechanics, this is perhaps best addressed by a popup that comes up when your alien item store reaches a certain monetary value.

The laser machinegun seems like it should operate similarly to the ballistic one but both fire modes fire a 10-round burst. Pretty sure the cheaper fire mode is meant to fire 3 rounds.

I really enjoy the different mission types and hope that the game will also implement capture missions that were talked about at one point. The game is better off without a mission timer, most of the time. But having a few missions that are different is great for variety and I see even more opportunities here. Abduction missions are timed but with a good implementation that lets you decide how you play - saving 5 civilians is fairly easy and can be done with cautious play, saving everyone gets you extra rewards but requires more aggressive play. The Cleaner intelligence mission is very fun, the map layout is great as well - you do a multi-directional assault on a building and then you're in a rush to fall back to the dropship. Ideally, I'd like to see something else like capture missions (stun a Cleaner agent) or rescue missions (save an unarmed/lightly armed scientist/pilot/witness that you control as an extra squad member on the mission). Terror missions could be further differentiated from crash sites by, for example, giving some aliens weapons that cause a lot of terrain damage so terror maps end up having more alien-caused environment destruction. I made it, for the first time, into later parts of the campaign, and there's of course pacing issues to be resolved, which I'm confident just needs more eyes. Despite devoting a lot of my economy to the air force, I can barely keep up and am shooting down one plane per wave. Getting more planes is very expensive, counting hangar + airplane construction + two torpedoes (the only weapon worth having). They also take forever to refuel and to repair, which I know is an intentional decision to prevent the same plane from doing too much in a wave, but I'd nonetheless argue refueling is a bit too slow and repair is considerably too slow, a damaged plane won't be nearly repaired by the time of the next wave. Anyway, none of this is a big deal, the campaign pacing will definitely improve through playing it, now that you can reach later stages with no major issues. There's one feature in the game now that's definitely going to be controversial, and that's destruction of secondary bases. Your second base will at some point likely be attacked by a UFO, so if you don't shoot it down, the base is gone. I'm sure that for many players that will be an instant ragequit moment - losing a base is a massive loss of investment that may be impossible to come back from and that's definitely the kind of thing players quit over. Personally I am fine with the mechanic... but I play X2 as an xcom game, which to me means mistakes are heavily punished. But to most players, I think it wouldn't even really be obvious that the second base can be attacked, and it's less obvious what to do about it. You need troops at your second base to defend it. Since those troops are going to be inexperienced and poorly equipped, you also need defensive batteries at the base to make sure any attacking UFO is heavily damaged. The design aspect that doesn't quite strike me right is that you must have troops even though you're trying to avoid using them. You want the UFO shot down by air planes or, failing that, defense batteries. But you must also have troops simply because the risk is otherwise too great, without troops you risk instantly losing the base. Not sure what the solution is here - it might work better if a certain amount of batteries (3?) was enough to guarantee a shootdown, which means taking randomness out of defensive battery fire, but that also needs to be somehow conveyed to the player, which does not seem easy. That definitely needs some thought though, perhaps not the most common scenario but a very important one in terms of how players will react.

It's more like two structures because you start with 2 living space available, so an extra lab needs an extra living quarters as well. Which you also need to build if you're getting an extra workshop, sure, but worth noting in the context of this discussion.

I'd agree that the UI is the bigger issue here, it's very unclear how much each scientist is contributing, and also unclear what the effects of hiring more would be. Same goes for engineers. Ideally, starting with an extra lab (or extra workshop) should be viable but not mandatory. Currently, scientists have such diminishing returns that it's not really viable, but I'm confident the right numbers can be found there.

Tangentially related to suppression, can we have the return of the X1 feature where aliens started with half their TUs on the first turn of a combat mission? In X2 especially, aliens are often within sight of the dropship and it is IMO annoying to shoot at them and be immediately hit with reaction fire. Later on reaction fire is perfectly fine but feels more frustrating than challenging on the first turn of some missions.

Ah yes, loading is possible by hacking the save!

I agree - but I think you can get it to a fun place instead with numbers tweaks only. If normal weapons (not LMGs which are for suppression) don't do enough suppression to suppress aliens most of the time, but instead it happens occasionally under mass fire - think once or twice per campaign - then it goes from a "win more" mechanic to a "saving throw" mechanic, where your initial failure suddenly has a silver lining. That's similar to soldier revival mechanics then, which would be a very bad feature if the rate was too high but otherwise provide a fun saving throw.

With such fixes that are mostly to the game logic and item stats, wouldn't it be possible to continue a previous save? The changelog does make it sound like there's no changes to the serialisation of data so it could perhaps be possible to load older ones nonetheless?

This sounds like an excellent solution to me. It accomplishes what feels right to me (near-dead aliens being easy to stun) and avoids the stunned-by-actual-guns problem. On suppression, I'm surprised you're suddenly having second thoughts. Going back to X1, I thought suppression was one of the clear major improvements compared to the original X-Com. It's a very useful tactical tool, you spend some actions that are unlikely to kill the alien but you weaken the alien for the next turn. Suppression makes them fire less on their turn, and eliminates reaction fire, so it's great for situations when you cannot kill the alien outright. It mostly works the same way in the final version of X1, each bullet applies a (small) amount of suppression along its trajectory, and then I think a bit more around the impact point. So the trajectory suppression lets you suppress your own soldiers by firing too close to them, and the impact-point suppression means you're likely to suppress the target by hitting the ground in front of it with a few bullets. I like gunfire suppression as well as long as it's a dedicated gun / fire mode. The current LMG is pretty good IMO with two fire modes, but the 10-round mode is a bit too weak at suppression and the 3-round mode a bit too weak at actual combat. I'd make the 3-round burst more accurate, boosting it in a direct combat role, and I'd make the 10-round mode more reliable at suppression, though I think the current 10-round burst is almost good enough at it. X1's mechanics resulted in the occasional suppression from concentrated non-LMG fire, too. That doesn't really feel important but an Xcom-style game benefits from such rare interactions.

Ah, the idea of decreasing stun endurance with HP is what I wanted to suggest, but seems like it's already in place, perhaps just with suboptimal numbers. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that e.g. a 60-HP alien reduced to 5 HP will have a stun threshold of roughly 30 HP (original 60 reduced by ~50% of the 55 damage taken). That would explain my observations why the alien can still survive smoke or a stun gun shot (have to agree with Emily that they're really weak now, even accounting for the fact that stun batons are meant to be better). Perhaps a unit's stun endurance could be limited to, say, three times their current HP, in addition to limiting by max HP. If I have badly wounded an alien who's barely alive at 5 HP, it seems the alien should be stunned very easily. Might also be good to reduce the stun effect of smoke and instead let flashbangs have some stun. A max height for grenade arcs seems like a good idea to me - I'll post screenshots of some arcs I find weird when I encounter them. I'll get a better sample size for the engineering stuff eventually, but my bottleneck is the air force upgrades in the fourth month - with the time it takes to build a couple extra planes and weapons for them, it's a very slow process. With three workshops, regular infantry weapons like Laser Rifles take more than 2 days to produce per gun. I'm talking about the time specifically, I haven't been having alloy shortages or even many money shortages, my workshops have been producing stuff nearly constantly but even so it seems they're unable to keep up with the demand. Maybe I'll experiment with expanding production even more by setting some up at the second base - wanted to put this out there but I'm not ready to definitively state that production is too slow.

A couple more thoughts. I know grenade arcs are an incredible pain in the rear, but I find some of the current arcs unsatisfying. You can throw grenades over many tiles of intervening cover, such as over a building or over one of those jungle plant clumps on a tropical map. Such a throw means the arc would be very high at its highest point, which indeed the graphical preview confirms, but those arcs are well beyond what seems realistic. It just messes with my expectations as a player, on both sides. I was on the receiving side of a very surprising Wraith grenade on a jungle map, and I several times found my soldiers being able to make throws that intuitively felt impossible. A height ceiling might be in order there - grenades are powerful in any case, and they probably work better if they're limited to paths that are somewhat realistic. Throwing grenades over walls or hedges is good, being able to throw them over wide buildings is too much. It's a grenade, not a mortar. On the economy side, I'm getting the feeling that manufacturing is impossible to keep up with. There's a lot to manufacture and, having built a third Workshop at my main base (with adjacency bonus), I'm constantly behind. It's great that you have to pick priorities and can't build everything easily, but I am not sure if the balance is right. Even the basic Angel interceptor is buildable (unlike X1), and we have to build aircraft weapons as well. Early on we get access to Accelerated guns but building a full set of those is slow so more gets researched, and some time into a campaign I find myself very behind on manufacturing. I don't have a full set of the latest weapons for my team, I don't have Alenium missiles on all my planes, I can't even think about upgrades like Alenium Generators. Perhaps that's intentional or I'm not playing right, but my intuition is that manufacturing is about 20% too slow - though I certainly love that it's overall tougher and requires more planning than X1. Stunning aliens is weird, you can have a nearly-dead alien survive smoke inhalation and stun gun fire. I understand they have different health/stun pools but it would feel more intuitive if the stun pool also dropped as their health drop, to some extent. A badly wounded alien shouldn't be too difficult to stun.

I have possibly the same bug, though not a very useful save. Researched Cleaner Operations some time ago but never got the data capture mission. Here's a save where you can confirm Cleaner Operations research from the Xenopedia, but no capture mission spawned as said. I also don't think I encountered any mission loading into the wrong one like Emily describes. user_day_109_manual_save-3.json

I am a certified idiot. I missed the fact that I can build planes from the workshop as normally, and the "no hangars" message actually means "no planes". For whatever reason, I was thinking of X1 where you get the basic plane and dropship from the Hangars screen, not the workshop. Might need some clarification in the UI though, there's probably someone else who will make the same mistake eventually.

So I'm getting this in 24.2 as well, on a different campaign. Hangars shown: Can I get the save file into a human-readable format so I can try to figure this out?

If you're trying to find a bug within Unity itself, you're braver than I am! Oh yes, I'm familiar with that article The reason I asked about LINQ is that I'm seeing a few hitches here and there that feel like the main thread having a spike of something, so I had to mention LINQ because it causes the garbage collector to occasionally do that kind of stuff, but sounds like you've already managed to keep allocations to a minimum. We're on 2020 LTS right now. I tried updating to 2021 a few weeks ago but it turns out 2021 has some kind of bug in the UI system that makes Unity hard crash as soon as out main UI canvas loads, so waiting for Unity to patch that one. That's probably karma for the earlier 2019 -> 2020 upgrade, which was perfectly smooth for us.

Very odd because the save is permanently bugged for me, reloads or not. Will keep an eye out.

In some places it just feels like an aesthetic choice, but others like the Recruit Soldiers button definitely feel wrong. I'm trying to figure out why and I think it has to do with UI conventions and the button state changing. When I open the Recruit Soldiers screen, the button is inactive. So I register its current appearance as inactive. Then I select a soldier, the button should be active but it's still displaying the same stripes... instead there's a very slight change in the shading. Going from just the picture I'm posted, I'm sure most people would interpret it as an inactive button due to e.g. not having the money. So part of the problem is the pattern itself, and part is that the distinction between active and inactive buttons is really subtle. I like having a more subtle UI but buttons changing to active should be much clearer.