Reactorcore

O__O ...were gonna need biggest guns.

^Same here, thank you Solver! Lol, all this time, all those many playthroughs of Xenonauts, I always thought that this was how gas/fire/smoke worked by default. This is also means that EMP-mine launcher from XMC mod can finally work to its full potential!

I appreciate the decision for abundant money and ability to explore and have freedom to experiment as much as possible with all the massive amount of content the mod offers. Keep it up!

Ah so your intention was just to brainstorm ideas. I must say its sometimes difficult to understand your english, so I took a different meaning from it by accident. I was feeling scared that the mod would be stuck in a pit and cannot progress, just because there was confusion with communication on adding new features in X:CE. I made a mistake assuming that was the situation.

Thank you Solver, so basically the answer is a no for Drages' request. @Drages, I noticed there was a certain feeling of confidence in your posts on the forums, giving an impression to me that your plans were possible and that Solver could absolutely do them. I feel you might want to step back for a second to make sure your communication with Solver on whatever ideas you were asking from him are 100% clear. No use in relying on features and options that do are not even feasible. : /

If Solver can do this, I'll eat my words about your request being impossible. @Solver, can you do what Drages is asking?

If the other option is not even possible or far too much for Solver to handle, then its not really even an option, is it? If it turns out impossible to do your request, Drages, what will you do? What *can* you do? Xenonauts source code is already a nightmare to work with, so something of an entire new tool, let alone making tweaks to scripting of the final mission is already very super difficult task. Not to mention it has to be done so that the vanilla game does not break. What I offer is a shortcut that allows customization of the final mission with as less effort as possible. Since the final mission is about killing the high praetor, substituting it with a regular battleship ufo is no different. Its actually even better, as you can put all those crazy new alien types you've added to X-Division.

Compared to what Drages is asking, it is the most low cost option. Thought I guess I should have used the word "most convinient" instead of "low cost". I do recognize the tremendous effort that goes into delving into the messy source of xenonauts, so I am grateful for the all the effort you've already done for us modders to be able to revitalize the game with new mods and expansions. I do feel guilty for asking you for more features, so I tried my best to propose this one to be as easy, low cost, most convinient as one could be possible, yet still have the biggest impact on the modding community.

Yes, thats exactly what I'd propose! Oh man, if that could be done, then that custom map could have anything put in it. Sure, it would be just a regular copy-pasted landed ufo map, but it could have its own custom list of 30-80 aliens (including any super-tough modded ones) for an epic, satisfying all-out last battle. It would also be easy to come up with an alternative lore and research projects that would lead up to this mission to truly make it feel special. And all this could be done in a very low cost way using a lot of the functionality in X:CE that is already there! I'm excited.

What about the tileset, must it strictly be final mission tileset or could it be the regular desert/city/forest one?

Can all that scripting be completely cut away? I was just thinking making a regular Landed Battleship UFO be the final mission. No extras.

Not even a simple switcharoo would be easy? Like this: if "Press Operation Endgame button" then *Load any groundcombat mission* if success then Win game if fail Lose game end Is this too complicated to achieve among the hardcoded stuff too?

I was wondering if it could be possible to tweak the hardcoding of the game, so that instead of loading Operation Endgame mission, the game would instead load a landed UFO mission, that upon completing would trigger a game victory? Since the scripting in the default final mission is apparently tricky, I figured if a simple substitute to a regular landed battleship ufo would be possible to hack instead? Landed UFOs are randomized, can be customized how many aliens they have and which aliens they will contain, so a custom instance of such a mission could make for a very awesome final mission, instead of the usual lame final mission with contrived triggers.

If the final map could be just replaced with either an alien fortress map or a recolored battleship map, except with a special list of four-five times more aliens than their regular counterparts, plus the ultimate boss alien mastermind, then that would work 10000x better than a convoluted story map with special objectives. It might seem like a cheap approach, but gameplay-wise it would be super satisfying.

Thank you, I'm happy to hear that. I still follow the progress of this mod from time to time and am very excited to play the final version. I got burned out by crashes, errors and incomplete content and balancing, that I decided to wait for the mod to fully complete before playing it again. I'm glad you explained how you see the development of the mod and the thoughts about not wanting it to end and instead to enjoy the journey, it really makes me understand better how you design and work. Personally, I don't see a single campaign of X-Division being something I want to avoid. With the gigantic amount of content, the randomized maps, the random situations that you can have with aliens, the endless combinations of soldier loadouts, soldier stats, armors, vehicles, RNGJesus randomly calculating hits and misses of each shot and many many other things... it makes X-Division a mod I'd want to play many times. Something I could replay as a monthly routine for the rest of my life, possibly infinitely. It can truly be that good. However, if there is no end game, no complete final arc that allows me to actually finish the game, I find the journey itself difficult to fully enjoy, knowing that the game will just eventually break due to bug or lead to an non-existent research project that I cannot continue progress from. Also having a final, epic "its now or nothing" challenge would greatly motivate me to try even harder and enjoy the game even more, knowing that the game will not let me down with a big grand finale, after which I can safely confirm that playthrough is officially over in a happy, satisfying way and I can happily start a new playthrough with new strategies and adventures. I'll be waiting for the final version of the mod and be happy to make an epic playthrough log series with lots of pictures, massive gratitude and positive feedback once its out.

In the final version of the X-Division, will the final mission (Operation Endgame) be changed in any way? I watched Muligan's final episode of him playing this mod and I felt dissapointment. If the final mission was a custom super UFO battleship-like map or an super hard alien base attack, that would be far more interesting and challenging as the final mission.

Hmm, so you're saying its like XCOM2 storywise is stuck between this limbo of introducing these rich characters that have the potential to give a stronger emotional connection with the world the game takes place in, but ends up using them so superficially that they may just have been as good as generic nameless staff members? Did I understand it correctly?

The biggest things I'm hoping for from xenonauts 2 is a very modular approach to interactive elements that applies to all entities universally. Things like gravity, fall damage, status effects, PSI, morale and such apply equally to both humans and aliens. The less hardcoded, the better. It would be great to have the possibility to have aliens as usable soldiers, than just strictly humans and vehicles only, if even as a modding thing, so adding things like cyborgs, androids, robots, animals, dogs and alien hybrids to fight alongside soldiers would be dope. I would most appreciate if weapon were not designed via traditional archetypes (pistol/rifle/shotgun), but put all the variables that a weapon can have* and craft weapons out of those, no matter how exotic they may be. *Accuracy, Power, Damage Type, Terrain Damage, Spread, TU cost, Complexity, Ammo Count, Weapon Range, Explosive, Penetrating, Submunitions (release fire/smoke/gas, mines, clusterbomblets, needles, bullets, gravitational push force...), Healing, Onehanded/Twohanded, Firing Trajectory (direct, mortar, homing), Recoil, Inventory Size, Weight, Reaction Speed, Status Effect Infliction, Firing Modes, Projectile Types (bullets, flames, gas, arcs, radiation, beams, rays, gravitational forces, liquid, darts, crystals, acid), Ammo Weight. Also I'm really hoping I can shoot a whole lot more bullets and actually run out of ammo in Xenonauts 2.

I'm curious what you would have wanted them to do instead. To me, I thought the stereotypical personalities were fitting for the purpose of the game, which is primarily about a replayable turn based combat game against alien invaders while story is there to simply give a backdrop, but not really intrude largely. Do you feel differently about this?

By watching beaglerush play XCOM 2, the biggest thing that made me excited was the depth of interactive mechanics. Things like: The null lance, which allows you to hit everything in a straight line The leaking acid trail from the Andromedon The fall damage that occurs when gravity pulls people down who had their floor blown up underneath them The emphasis on terrain destruction to remove cover The ability to create new cover with one of the armor abilities How armor is handled as a seperate layer and not some degrading percentage thing How fire, acid, emp, PSI and other elemental things are infused in weapons, abilities and items Actual melee weapons A whole host of status effects that apply to both humans and aliens alike The drone that can hack, heal and attack Extended PSI abilities for both sides Armors that provide massive tools to do really interesting things, like grapple onto roofs or walk through walls Multilayered enemies, like the Andromedon, the cocoon left by a Chrysalid Aliens that empower each other in many ways (holotargeting, shields, armor, mobility boost) Aliens that disempower your soldiers in many ways (less accuracy, less mobility, immobilization, stunning, poison, PSI...) PSI abilities that raise the dead Ability to call an evac anywhere on the level A lot of different things that directly affected the geoscape and alien activities outside the mission The other thing that also really impressed me was the aesthetics behind weapons, like there was actual thought put into how they work and that reflected on they behaved in combat, with plasma weapons noticably charging up before firing, magnetic weapons having these cool unique muzzle flashes. And the armors look so sexy and sleek. Finally, the character customization and the character pool features was just awesome. I've seen people customize them to look very familiar to things from other sources and even give them bios. The best part that these characters can also be villains that you have to capture or kill, adding even more depth to the gameplay. Also the many ways they've incorporated the character portraits in the game world was superb, like wanted posters in cities and so on. Theres a lot to learn and take inspiration from XCOM 2, thats for sure.

I can come up with some fun ones: Only use snipers. No other primary weapons allowed. Only use explosives (rockets/c4/grenades) Melee only (With a mod that adds an actual melee weapon) No armor allowed Always do missions at night Non-lethal playthrough (never kill only stun, except androns) Use only half a squad (use half the capacity of a dropship, no more) One man mission (aka Ramirez Do Everything mode)

In steam: Xenonauts-> Properties -> BETAS -> Community Edition Boom, now you're running the official branch of X:CE in steam. Then just subscribe to any mods you want. This is actually the recommended way of playing modded xenonauts, so yes its possible.

Use the "Roof" icon to hide all walls and scenery. This allows you to better target what you want, especially if you're trying to throw a grenade somewhere near an alien, but not directly on him.

Wow, sometimes it feels like new AAA games seem to completely disregard older systems that even the lowest settings wont run the game, despite its fully possible to optimize them. That makes me sad. : ( But enough of that, for it is time for the Grand Finale! Playthought LOG 13: - FINAL - Dreadnought Genocide This is it, the final mission. The moment I've prepared for... The one last push to stop the aliens once and for all... I made a small "movie" to capture the action. Lets see how it goes. Let the final battle begin! It was a pure massacre. Nothing could stop it. In only mere 3 turns, the whole dreadnought's interior was set ablaze with nuclear fire, the high praetor was vaporized into thin gooey mist across the floor and all of my troopers were at the exit, safely teleported out of the dreadnoughts doomed interior. Turn 1. The door opens, the first salvo is released, annihilating the first batch of sebilian guards. Gone. Two more xenonauts proceed slighly forward and launch one salvo in each side room, obliterating the androns within. Another two move up and fire an additional salvo into the depths of each sideroom's large engineering rooms, eradicating both alien generators along with the sebilians guarding it. Another unit moves up and a lucky harridan sniper tries one last desperate attempt at stopping the invaders by firing a reaction shot. It connects, but it only causes a scratch. Within the next moment, that harridan, along with his pals guarding the huge room behind them is bathed in yet more nuclear fire. The door to the huge room is also demolished in the explosion, opening the way for one more xenonaut to send one last salvo in to the depths of the huge room. A giant ball of fire later, everything inside the huge room was dead. The team uses their remaining TUs to move up as far as possible towards the high praetor's chamber. Turn 2. The door to the high praetors chamber is open and exposed as soon as I see it. Not wasting any time, a xenonaut points his laser designator and locks on to the target. As the massive explosion roars through the halls of the UFO, a faint *splat* sound was heard in the distance as the high praetor hit by the blast. Subsequent xenonauts move up and confirm that nothing survived that last hit and moved up to get ready to open the door to the exit teleporters. All that was left, was to evacuate the team and let the dreadnought self-destruct once everyone was out. The team moves up towards the teleporters. Turn 3. The whole dreadnought is in flames, torn apart and charred anywhere you look. The team wastes no more time and uses the amazing mobility provided by their sentinel turbo suits to boost themselves all the way to the exit within this turn. The reapers never managed to reach this floor and the sole surviving sebilian that was spared by a nuke during the first turn in one of the siderooms was probably freaking out in panic, not believing what had just happened before its eyes. And with that, the alien menace was over. GG. And now, for a Final Report on XMC 2.0: Overall, it was ok, the variety offered to me was compelling, some of the new items were huge game changers, like the new armors, special soldier equipment, the new vehicles and their weapons as well as the early-game soldier weapons. Its not excellent however. There are some flaws that did reduce the quality of the experience and sometimes felt like the changes weren't prominent and felt like I might as well have played the vanilla game. The biggest thing was the I noticed there is a specific, efficient way of playing the game. Certain things are just better than others in a lot of ways. If I were to use certain equipment, vehicles or aircraft, I'd be doing so while arbitrarily handicapping myself instead of doing the thing that is most efficient and obvious. Another huge issue was that in early game, the speed at which I transitioned from Rank 1 to Rank 2 and to Rank 3 was blazingly fast. I barely got to experience those items before I already had upgraded them. By the time lasers became available, most of ballistics were as good as inferior, even the alenium ones. Conversely, mid-game and late-game had barely any variety the same way there was during the early periods of the game. It almost feels like the best way of playing this mod is to pretend that lasers, plasma and mag do not exist, but instead arbitrarily limit myself to the early ballistic weapons only. The end-game arsenal ended up being the regular pistol-shotgun-rifle-sniper-mg thing as it was in vanilla. This whole "lots of stuff early-in, no variety later-on" was the case with aircraft too. It was even more simple since condors and marauders were the only thing that I ever used and needed. In the early game, there are observational balloons, new dropships, new fighters and all sorts of things, but later on its the same ol' vanilla route with marauders and valkyries dominating the geoscape. The alien weapons also felt comically underpowered compared to human plasma weapons. An alien plasma rifle could only hold 9 rounds, while a human version had 12. Considering the aliens are a superior race with superior tech, I was expecting their weapons and tech to be leagues ahead of whatever the humans tried to imitate. I also thought the new alien gear was underused, along with the caesan spy as I mentioned in the previous log. There is an opportunity to expand the alien arsenal with more exotic variants and special weapons to make for some radically different ground combat scenarios. Vehicles I wanted to enjoy more, but from what I saw in using the jeep, it was pretty cool what type of weapons they can carry. It just a shame the early dropship that can carry vehicles are so slow compared to the regular troop transports. Also the limited ammo that comes with vehicles also greatly limit their utility compared to a regular xenonaut trooper. Armors I felt were really great, especially the late game sentinel and predators and mid-game jackal and wolf armors. Despite that, some of them didn't communicate clearly enough what their stats are, especially the late-game armors, and to some degree, I felt they could have been even more significantly different from one another, as mostly they felt like they're all the same armors, but with a superficial bonus over the other one. I think the sentinel armors did this the best, while the others were less so exciting. Manufacturing and research also felt disjointed. The time to research/build didn't correspond to logical values considering the value of the items in terms of tech complexity, gameplay power and size. Some things required alloys, while others didn't. Some required them more than others, but felt like they were like that arbitrarily defined than based off a standard of any kind. No consistency I felt was there. Some items did not yield profit at all when manufactured. The transfer cost of items from base to base was also astronomical, which discouraged building anything off-site, punishing the player for having a logical secondary base that does manufacturing seperately from another one. I liked the building additions a lot, save for the medical bay upgrades causing crashes and the large garage being unstable. I did think that the building times for the advanced radars was perhaps a bit too much. 20 days is a bit crazy, so I think 15 or even 10 would have been more suitable. I also noticed that I get a lot of alien corpses piling up in my storeroom, but the only ones I ever used for anything were light drone wreckages for antigrav devices, while others had no other use than to be directly sold... so didn't seem like there was any sense for them to be shipped off to my store room and not just simply sold at the end of a mission. It was also interesting that wraiths did not follow the same logic and got auto-sold at the end of the mission and I think I saw one armor mentioning that they needed wraith corpses to manufacture them. It was also strange that the xenopedia article mentioned wraiths before I even met them ingame. And finally, laser designators make me feel like humans are way more powerful than aliens, making the overall feel of the game like the aliens are not really that much of a threat when I can just call down the sun on their heads, splattering them effortlessly if I feel so. Frankly, most weapons, armors, vehicles and equipment in the game make me feel like this. This whole playthrough was more of a powertrip than a desperate struggle to defeat the aliens thanks to the balancing of the items introduced in XMC. Either way I had fun, but will be taking a long break from xenonauts before playing it again. Final Log END.

Playthrough LOG 12: Carrier & Battleship UFO Assault. After a few weeks after the Alien Fortress, the first Carrier UFOs finally show up. With the sentinel/predator armors with mag carbines/magstorms, assaulting through two Carrier ships was a piece of cake. I really like the armors introduced in XMC, the sheer power they offer to the soldiers is incredible. However, sometimes its slightly unclear what their stats and bonuses are until you use them in combat, since unlike wolf and jackal armors, that have fully listed stats in the xenopedia article, which is a really good idea, the predator and sentinel variants don't offer that. As this was being the second to last UFO that I'd be doing, I reflected back on the aliens and the weapons they used. XMC, as far as I noticed during gameplay, only introduced a neural stunner and another stun gun for the alien... but those were really rare and not significant during gameplay. Even after I got them myself for my soldiers, their usefulness was not impressive compared to the human tech. During the whole playthrough, after encountering those two new alien weapons and the new caesan spy, I was really excited and thought that the aliens would get more advanced and dangerous weapons above the alien battle rifle or other more exotic choices as the human side gets in XMC. Heck, maybe more prominent use of caesans spys as a UFO crew that is mostly only them, featuring a very different kind of tactics with some new exotic weapons. Felt like an underused opportunity there. In general, I thought the addition of new aliens and weapons is really cool as it complete adds more layers and depth to combat, along with new tactics that I as the players would need to adapt to defeat them. Anyway, after clearing out the two carriers (the first one had a busted hyperdrive, so I couldn't research it and thus had to fight another carrier to get it), the road to the final mission was finally open: Now, at this point I already had everything I needed and could have just started the final mission, but since I'm playing XMC to explore the new modded xenonauts experience as much as possible in a single go and give complete feedback to make sure it'll be better in the end, I decided to wait for a battleship to show up and complete the full research tree. The battleship was definitely the hardest challenge yet. The first one that showed up was a EliteSebilian/AlphaReaper/Praetor crewed Terror mission oriented Battleship. I scrambled my Marauders to take it down before it could actually start the terror mission, but despite taking it out, I was really hoping it didn't contain Reapers. Especially 5 of them. And those 5 were upgraded Alpha Reapers. Eeesh. With reapers threatening to pop out of out of viewing range to insta-gib my troops into zombies, heavily armored and armed elite sebilians tossing lethal plasma fire behind heavy cover, lots of precarious teleporters to go through to reach the final floor and on top of that and a praetor that was really enthusiastic at mindcontrolling my troops, which could easily end up in a massacre, was really dangerous every step of the way. A lot of troops could have been killed back there. Even the nuke jeep finally met its demise. Just outside the Battleship, a shield/mag pistol trooper got mindcontrolled. Now, this guy was in turbo sentinel armor, he is a valuable asset on the team on this mission and all my stun weapons were left at HQ since no one needed to be captured anymore, so putting him temporarily to sleep was not an option. I'd also rather not just cap his ass right there and then. Dude has been a hero in about forty missions. So I did very risky strats and decided to rush to the top floor to take out the praetor as fast as I could. I blocked the MC'd troopers path with the jeep, which valiantly took the hit and blew up for the team, while the rest of the team charged into a multi-floor UFO that potentially had alpha reapers ready to come out of any corner and zombify my whole team. Luckily the MC'd shield trooper ran away after exploding the jeep, so I didn't have to worry about him attacking from behind with his lethal mag pistol, but that became least of my worries as the praetor switched his mind and mind controlled a mag shotgun wielding guy in the middle of my team. Everyone instantly ran the hell away from him and the exits were blocked with shield units preparing to brace for impact from a mag carbine. On the next turn the MC'd shotgunner opened fire on one of the shield man keeping rest of the team seperate from him, but luckily the shield help and most of the shots missed and took out an entire wall instead. Meanwhile, it turns out there was an alpha reaper waiting on the next floor, ready to attack on the next turn, so I had to pray a couple of my troops that barely had TU's to and reaction speed to stop that monster before it reached them. Soon that nightmare was over. The reaper was torn to shreds by reaction fire as I hoped it would be as it came through the teleporter and the Mind controlling wore off. Reaching the top floor, an intact singularity core was waiting and a praetor with his sebilian goons were promptly killed. With that, I had completed the final UFO mission I needed to get the last researchable components, which eventually unlocked the singularity gun, fury interceptor and the saracen, all of which I felt were completely pointless to build and also prohibitively expensive, since singularity cores are NOT easy to get as you saw above. Meanwhile all the tech I got before that was adequate to take out any threat the aliens threw at me. Counsil had maxed out for most regions, so they didn't even bother giving a raise anymore. I didn't mind since after selling the last batch of the stuff I didn't need, along with the alenium grenade stash, I had amassed a whopping 500 million dollars to end the campaign with. Next time, the final mission, the grand finale awaits. Until FINAL log...