Search the Community

Hi All, I haven't even started playing this game. It's downloading now. I have been watching it for awhile. In the meantime, I have been playing Enemy Within (after Enemy Unknown). This is a stripped game from the original Xcom, but Enemy Within is especially enjoyable. I am expecting this game to be even better with many more options and even greater immersion. All that said, I would like to see new Xcom games based on a counter invasion. Why couldn't Xenonauts 2-3 be games where we take the fight to the aliens? This would allow for even more innovation, some "exploring" of the place they came from etc. I could even see see a strategy game where you build up your bases to launch a counter-attack, all based on our own advances along with the alien tech. Of course, I would not want to change the tactical play.... What do you guys think? Regardless, I am getting ready to fire up the game and have some fun.

Hi everyone, I just finished my first session playing Xenonauts pre-release and as always as of late I streamed it live on twitch! This was my first look at the game, having followed the development at a distance for quite some time. I recently started a Classic XCOM-series and the timing was just right as the Xenonaut pre-release hit just afterwards. I had a lot of fun playing the game and I will be continuing to stream content featuring Xenonauts in the future. I try to give a lot of commentary about game features in my stream, but it could also be interesting just to see how someone completely new to the game (but not to the XCOM-series) reacts when playing. Since I am playing a lot of UFO right now I make a lot of comparisons between the games, sorry about that - but it's all honest opinions with no ill intent. Please give me some feedback, and maybe you can answer some of the questions and thoughts I had during the stream! Channel - www.twitch.tv/jsbgame Episode 1 Episode 2 part 2

Welp, it looks like it's off the table. http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/12/4218902/2k-marin-xcom-shooters-website-and-youtube-videos-taken-offline

[video=youtube;z8zZsecTRfM]

A few people have already found it (highfive), but I started up a play-through of Xenonauts in its current state several days ago. I've been doing update videos for a while but haven't had much time to really play it until recently, so it's effectively a blind play-through if you're into that sort of thing. I look at it as a way of seeing how intuitive and balanced it is for an X-Com veteran. I'm not very far in it and I need to restart already (Hotfix 1), but I hope some people are willing to come along for the ride. I'll likely accept volunteered soldier names later on; for now I'm sort of enjoying the defaults. I could use some help tip-wise as far as research paths and all that goes, but try to keep the backseat gaming to a minimum I intend to keep it going throughout beta. Some updates will probably break the save but that's fine. It depends on what the update does, but I may just get back to where I was off-camera if nothing in the early-game was modified heavily. Chances are I'll try to continue where I was and just refer to an update video for the details. Edit: Celebrating Steam release; started over due to popular demand:

Found this quite interesting. Sharing this for those that might be interested http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/04/the-guy-who-made-the-new-xcom-meets-the-guy-who-made-the-first-x-com/

I elected not to put in Xenonauts because it is unfinished.

Starting up a Let's Play of X-Com: Terror from the Deep on superhuman difficulty. I'm limiting myself to using just one base in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and I'm not reloading. I'm using XComUtil 9.7 for the bug fixes and to disable mind control. Could use some soldier names if anyone wants to get involved. I don't claim to be an expert at the game, but I know what about half the buttons on the Triton do, so.. could be fun? Links:

i love xcom i still play the first one time by time. and i liked the new reboot. BUT i thought that i would never like the ide of a FPS (well it is a third person game now) version of xcom. there are two main thing that got my hype motor up first it is set in 1960 and it is about the first day of xcom and you have your base and you could hire new agents and set them out on different places in the world but it is a fps the basic xcom stuff but dumb down or what you call it in eng. but i rather have a old school xcom that is about the first days of xcom. sorry for my bad grammar and sorry if it is hard to understand what i am trying to say

http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/914467-xcom-enemy-unknown-review-ufo-apocalypse Firaxis havn't messed up. If Xenonauts is just as good as this when finished it'll do me! I will get both anyway, as I have seen enough of Chris'es brainchild to convince me it's going to be just as good.

Found this video on youtube,(well, okay, on my front page) seems like they will talk about TFTD next week. Anyway, worried about what they will say about Apocalypse but its still rather interesting to watch.

So yeah, read this: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/10/01/xcom-shooter-may-now-be-third-person-downloadable?abthid=5068f841f98ad67f2000004b What do you think about that?

The Kickstarter has gone live here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts It's already got a backer even though it went live less than 5 minutes ago, which is nice! Any help you can give us would be greatly appreciated - this includes spreading the word about us if you're not donating! The demo is available for download on the page, so if any of your friends are unsure about the game, just tell them to download it and have a play. I'm really hoping that this Kickstarter will give us the funds to put together a small team to work on the game full-time so we can finish it far more quickly and to a higher standard than otherwise. Just to clarify - anyone who has already Premium pre-ordered the game will get access to all the Kickstarter Premium Preorder rewards too. If you've already pre-ordered and want to claim a higher reward, you can donate and email us and we'll add the price of your existing pre-order to your pledge. So if you have a Premium Preorder already and stick a $20 donation in, you'll get the equivalent of an $50 donation minus the extra copy of Xenonauts. Thanks for the support of all the people on the forum who have helped us out along the way - there's an awful lot of you! Special thanks to Kilrathi, who worked with us to set up the US company which allowed us to get around not being US-based. It was a lot of effort and I appreciate the tinme you sunk in. Let's hope this goes well - fingers crossed!

Build V10 is currently being uploaded onto Desura. This will be the Kickstarter Press Build that we'll be sending out to journalists so they can preview the game. Barring any serious crash bugs or things that are affecting gameplay, the .exe files will not change any further between now and the public release build - we may make some balance tweaks, update misaligned / broken tiles and update images, but we won't be making any further changes. This is simply because efforts to fix the bugs can end up causing more bugs, and we have to draw the line somewhere if we want to know we have a stable build for when the Kickstarter goes live. There are a variety of fixes, but here's the headlines: - Hidden Movement loop should be stopped. It was caused by aliens running out of ammo and then trying to fire their weapons anyway. - The Ferret should now have its LOS returned to normal. - The new props for the Industrial tileset have now been painted over in their undamaged forms. - Various mis-set tiles have been updated - Toggle Roof now defaults to being off rather than on, which should reduce confusion - Alien Light Drones (we need to come up with a better name for them than that) now have a less powerful weapon, so they can't one-shot your Ferret any more - Ferrets now have better ballistic armour and are less vulnerable to damage to Xenonaut small arms (friendly) fire - Typos and errors in the Xenopedia have been updated - The Alenium grenade sprites should be displayed correctly - The Basic Armour troops with Shotguns should vault walls correctly - Tooltips in the Air Combat now have appropriate line breaks so are a more reasonable size - Pressing M on the Geoscape no longer nets you $1m - Alenium and Alien Alloys now only sell for $1,000 or $2,000 each instead of 10x that - Alien fighters can now dodge missiles as intended The online manual is starting to take form at http://www.xenonauts.com/manual.html Please give the build a whirl. If there's any bugs, we'll want to know about them before we send it to journalists. Hopefully it'll basically just be a slightly more stable version of V9.5.1 though.

Two recurring complaints throughout development have been: 1) For a joint NATO / Soviet organisation, the Xenonauts sure don't have much Soviet equipment. They do have Soviet soldiers, but their weapons are American and their vehicle is British. We used to be able to point to the MiG interceptor, but even that is now researchable rather than starting. 2) There's not enough different ballistic weapons - we only have one type of assault rifle, for example. The M-16 and the AK-47 actually behave quite differently in reality. While vanilla Xenonauts is not going to add any extra weapons or change the existing ones for design reasons, we've always said we'll make it as easy as possible for people to mod the game to their preferences. As such, the build now includes art for Soviet equivalents of the starting Xenonaut weapons, as well as a few unused NATO weapons we did while settling on the current selection. There is a total of 16 new images there. It's now just a question of altering text files to change the NATO weapons into Soviet weapons, or to add extra guns like AK-47s into the game. In fact, with the tool Quartermaster is working on it may even be easier than that soon. I was going to stick these in a mod, but without an installer we can't have it automatically loaded onto everyone's PC (yet). We might include the Soviet Weapon mod as an example mod to go with the final game though. The guns can be found in the directory /assets/weapons/ballistic. A few of the weapons are shown below:

Build V9.4 has now been released through the Desura client (though I don't think it is yet active for those doing the standalone download). Barring a couple of small new features and some bugfixes, this is basically the build that will be released to the general public along with the Kickstarter build (we'll also add new art as and when it becomes available). Please test it as much as you can. If there's any major bugs in the build, we need to squish them before public release for obvious reasons. The key new features are as follows: - We've added a new launcher window to the game. This is a bit ugly, but in terms of functionality it is a big improvement. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, the game will remember your screen resolution from game to game, so starting up is less of a pain in the ass (resolution can be set in the Options screen). Secondly, we've added the Quick Battle function, which will load up a Terror Site immediately after you place your base. This is basically for people who want to try the combat but don't want to go through the early game to get there, but hopefully you guys will enjoy it too. This feature will not be in the final version of the game. - A new alien type has been added to the build, a light combat drone that appears on the Terror Site. The animations are not yet all there for it (nor are the SFX) but they will be before the game comes out. In terms of role I think these drones will come into their own a lot more once we implement supression, plus the AI to go with them. They're intended to harass the player at long range with inaccurate long-range rapid fire weapons, but without suppression they don't really have their own niche yet. Still, I like them. They're kinda cute in their own way. We're working on a nice death animation for them too, which should arrive this week. - The Xenopedia has several new research images in it, and should display better than before. The only major issue with it is that the text is still being cut off prematurely. I need to look into that in a bit more detail, as it's a problem with the game engine rather than anything that our programmers can do anything about. - I've spent a little time on the Title Screen, scaling up the text and formatting it better to make it easier to read. There's still a problem with the text scaling here though so on a large monitor it'll still be largely unreadable (though better than before). - I've added some new maps to the game, and I'll try to expand them a bit so there's more variation. The Light Scout maps are smaller than before now, though the Scout maps are the same size. Should be better than before though. Obviously you can check out the (still WIP) Town tileset too by clicking on the Quick Battle. There's some new props floating around on the Industrial maps though, and I've designed them to have fewer buildings than before. - The MiG construction images should be working well now. There's three images that show the progress of the construction. - There's a new grenade explosion, so now it's a bit smaller than the massive explosion we use for the rockets and explosive scenery. There's also a new plasma-type explosion for the alien grenades, but they aren't throwing them yet so you're unlikely to see it. - We've put various bugfixes in place. These include fixes for building the MiG causing your engineers to disappear, or your money to vanish. Also, UFOs should display their size correctly now. Previously they were always displaying as Medium irrespective of their actual size. - There's also been a pretty major fix to the accuracy formulas. Previously shots were missing targets, but not scattering properly and so not deviating from their original shot path. This led to shots "missing" but frequent still striking their intended targets, effectively making weapons much more accurate than intended. The AI bug has not been fixed yet unfortunately, so I imagine you'll still encounter hangs in the ground combat. We'll release a hotfix for that when it arrives and we'll also fix any major issues you guys encounter in the testing pronto. We want to be sending this build out soon, so hopefully you'll see a flurry of activity from us over the next few days. The features we want to add to this build before it is complete are: 1) Adding Smoke and Nerve Gas grenades 2) Updated smoke / fire for the existing Frag grenade to couple with the new explosion animation. These will no longer generate fire, and the smoke will be thinner than the real thick stuff you get in the larger explosion. 3) There's a problem with the multi-tile rendering so multi-tile objects appear on the wrong layer and sometimes below things they should be (you can occasionally see this with the Chinook walls). 4) Extra art: - Light drone injury and death animations - Updated tiles (painted over versions) for the Town tileset and the new Industrial props, as many of the tiles are still currently 3D guides. 5) We'll add some civilians for the terror map. They're currently there, but don't have sprites so are invisible. 6) If possible, auto-toggle roof off toggle when a unit is behind a building I'm pretty tired now so I'm heading to bed, but give it a try and let us know what you think.

This is a small patch for Build V9.3 because for some reason I forgot to re-compile the .exe files before I released the build, so they are a bit out of date. This should: - Fix the game starting in a window and skipping the launcher. - Fix a bug where the game crashes if you open your inventory above an alien corpse (as the alien plasma clip images were incorrectly set) - Add a new image for the Alien Alloys research.

OK, so Build V9.3 is uploading to Desura and will be available as soon as it is authorised. I expect it to hit in about an hour, asuming the Desura guys are still online when the uplaod finishes. The following improvements have been made: - We have implemented a new Xenopedia screen that pops up when a research project is completed. This still needs a bit of work in terms of text scaling etc, but we'll have it done for the weekend. It is also not currently displaying the full research text (about 80% of it) so they end a bit abruptly at the moment. - The tech tree has been fixed so you can once again access Wolf Armour and Laser Weapons, and it has been expanded to include Alenium Missiles and Alenium Torpedos for your aircraft. The Alenium Grenade has also been added but I've not set it up in the game so it'll still be identical to a normal grenade until the weekend. Autopsies have also been added but don't give the +10% damage bonus yet. - The air combat now has a contextual menu that can be activated by right-clicking on any interceptor. This pauses the game and allows you to issue them commands without using the sidebar. - The air combat has been made marginally more balanced. Expect Corvettes to cause you some headaches when you encounter them. - Aircraft and vehicles now fill hangar / garage slots when construction begins have a WIP construction image. In the next build there will be three images that the game cycles through that shows the progression of the construction. - You now have to go through the Soldier Development screen at the end of a ground combat mission, as a lot of people didn't seem to know it existed. This now displays the Wounded / Injured days correctly after combat too. - The game now has an Alt-Tab icon. - A terror site is generate at 475 on the ticker. This is still incomplete but will hopefully be complete by the weekend. - The game ends at 550 on the ticker and shows a congratulatory screen. It also asks you to buy the game - this is just a test for the public release of this build. Bugfixes: Ground Combat: - Ground Combat can now start fter loading the auto save. - Weapon reload sounds added to the game. - Correct recovery time for injured / wounded soldiers will appear on the soldier development screen after ground combat missions. - Climbing stairs will work properly in the barn. AI: - AI is no longer ignoring vehicles on ground combat missions. Geoscape: - Equiping different rockets to your MiG will no longer cause the game to crash. - The notification can now be cancelled if large numbers of buildings were completed at the same time. - Fighters above ground will no longer "crash to the sea". - An alert window will appear if you cannot manufacture a plane due to not having a free hangar slot. - The game will no longer crash if you attack a landed UFO that has taken off again. - The game will no longer crash when tailing targets on the geoscape. - The chinook will no longer float above the target crash site after loading the auto-save.

Build V9.1 has been finalised and is released on Desura! This is only available with the Desura client download (it should give you an update icon on the Play page) - downloading without the client as a .rar file will take a day or two to update yet. Full update notes are below, but the big news is that AI is back in and now the aliens are moving and shooting. It's not particularly refined and hopefully we'll make big improvements on it over the next month or so, but at least the game is playable once again. Sorry for the delay on this front - I know it's been painful. Two other major things to talk about quickly: Firstly, I've put new tiles in for the Scout and Light Scout (new UFO type) and there will be more UFO tiles coming, as well as the Chinook tiles being added to the game now. Generally this is great, but right now there's no UFO interiors so there's a couple of things missing that are needed for the tech tree to reach lasers / Wolf armour. We'll patch them back in next week, likely next weekend, when we add the interiors for the various craft. Secondly, as part of a much wider revamp of the research / manufacturing in the game that I did in the last week, we've made the MiG interceptor researchable instead of purchaseable. Unfortunately, there's a complication - it turns out the functionality to manufacture aircraft is not yet in place so you can unlock the manufacture but it doesn't work. Again, we'll get this fixed and patch this in next weekend. As the F-17s are now all you need in the early game, you're not missing out - just be aware of it. We're working on some features arriving in the next few weeks that I'm looking forward to showing off, but this update should keep you ticking over until next weekend. As always, if there's any bugs then post them up on our forums...but hopefully this should be a pretty stable build. Features: - AI is back in. - A new UFO has been added, the Light Scout. This is slower than weaker than previous UFOs and can be shot down by a single F-17 (it is set up to be shot down after two Sidewinder hits). As such, the MiG-32 is now researchable (although for the reasons mentioned above, not yet manufacturable). -The research project Alien Invasion has been added to the start of the game. This is the trigger for the MiG research becoming available. - New ground combat tile have been added for the Light Scout that has landed or crashed on the Farm tileset, and the Scout crashed on the Farm and the Industrial tileset. - The new Chinook tiles have also been added. -New ground combat UI has been added. This is still a WIP but includes an improved AP Reserve slider which shows the shot costs next to it, a Quick Reload and Quick Grenade throw button. Tooltips are also partially implemented. - Units in the Chinook will now automatically re-arrange themselves to accommodate vehicles instead of simply blocking the vehicle assignment if there is no 3x3 space present. - An extra copy of the select circle now appears above the head of units on mouseover, making it easier to select and identify units behind walls. - Weapons now have reload sounds. - Soldier portraits will repeat less frequently. - We have added new tiles for the Chinook and new tiles for the crashed Scout, although this is currently only present on the Farmyard tileset. We will roll out additional UFOs in the next few weeks. - Buildings now display roofs until you have a unit inside them, irrespective of camera level. There’s still some teething issues with this system but we’re working through it. - You can now modify the construction times and maintenance costs of buildings in /assets/buildings.xml, and building maintainance costs have been significantly reduced. - The alien invasion AI can now be balanced – the AM_ file in /assets/ allow you to specify which alien UFO types will appear flying the mission at what points. - UFOs are now less likely to immediately flee from combat when attacked with superior numbers of human craft. Bugfixes (amongst others): Ground Combat: - The camera is no longer restrained by the edges of the map on the Farm tileset. - The random crash associated with reaction fire has been fixed Air Combat: - Interceptors now move at correct speed when fightning against corvettes - The ”Invisible Fighter” issue (where the icon sometimes did not display) should be fixed. Geoscape: - Undetected UFOs will no longer spam the game with UFO Detected notifications if they attack Xenonaut craft. - Interceptors will now detect alien bases as soon as the base enters radar range of the craft. - Selling items on the store screen no longer results in an extra item being sold. - The Intercept window will no longer appear in duplicate if you intercept a UFO using the Intercept button Miscellaneous: - Pressing the ESC button will now correctly take you to a higher level of the menu

What would an XCOM Massively Multiplayer Online Strategy Game be like? I think you could have a lot of fun with this. Basically, it would be all first-person or third-person, with different levels of management. You could have an XCOM global board of directors (would probably spend a lot of time at a desk, but could travel), base commanders, squad leaders, and individual soliders. Soldiers could spend downtime in the gym, in the manufacturing bay, or in the research facility to round out their attributes. You could have puzzle elements with players being scientists or manufacturing guys and making progress by completing puzzles, but they could also visit the gym. They could also pick up weapons and defend their base if needed. You could be an interceptor or transport pilot. You could be a civilian contractor, or a civilian running from aliens. You could even have human players acting as the aliens. What do you think?

http://www.edge-online.com/features/julian-gollop-xcom?page=1 I wish he knew about Xenonauts and his thoughts.

Rumours ahead! Read it yourself at RockPaperShotgun

This just in: that other, more, uhm, "contemporary" game which pits humans versus extraterrestrial invaders has slipped past its expected release date of March 9, 2012 into Take-Two's next fiscal year. 2K Marin, the studio behind the project, allegedly laid off 15 developers a couple of weeks ago, so the delay wasn't entirely unexpected. While I can't say I eagerly anticipate XCOM's release, the game's art direction and sound design have done enough to keep me vaguely interested. Also, I'm not fundamentally allergic to first-person shooters, and the studio already has one such game I enjoyed (BioShock 2) under their collective belt. However, I was really looking forward to witnessing Xenonauts and XCOM go at it head-to-head, and as a result, Team Goldhawk gaining more traction by doing justice to the roots of the franchise. The chances of that happening just slimmed down considerably. Bummer. On a brighter note, at least we've won extra time to make converts out of the youth of today before they blow their pocket money on some cookie-cutter FPS with space aliens!