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Goldhawk, I was curious about what you thought about world governments (beyond providing funding) directly providing contract missions for the Xenonauts to potentially execute. Or they may come in the form of optional objectives within the standard missions. For example, supporting or relieving local forces, capturing aliens alive for their own research purposes, turning over captured alien bases entirely to the host government, after you already captured one for your purposes, for a pricey commission. I know the Geoscape effort to help develop a more lively narrative is a highly desirable goal within the community, and I think this may add to the tactical side of the game as well. I ask because I am one of those £500 Kickstarter backers, and I was really intrigued about being apart of the game. You mentioned the option of "Geoscape Situations" which included missing personnel, and that lead me to believe you may be interested in more diverse missions. If such options are possible, I would much more prefer to be represented a member of the local forces (US Army) that make contact with the Xenonauts during a mission; i.e. my unit is combat ineffective before the onset of a terror mission, but if one of the Xenonauts is able to link up with me on the map then I can provide off-map artillery fire support for the remainder of that mission. support like, Immediate Suppression and/or Immediate Smoke fire missions that can be called at the beginning of each turn. Just curious about what you think? P.S. Scott Manley (from Youtube) I believe got many of us into the first Xenonauts, and I think it would be awesome if you included him in some of the artwork for the research/tech tree. LOVE THE GAME!

Hi Guys, so I read that the Xeno2 Kickstarter was going to launch today, but unless I'm blind (distinctly possible) I've not seen any recent marketing or communications to that effect. Can someone tell me what's going on?

In which we spread the word on the best Kickstarter projects. So join up! Do your part! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1964463742/the-mandate

....and by god does it resonate! Take a read.

Okay - I know that I preordered this game (I think through kickstarter?) quite a while ago. Is there any way to tell what level I preordered at? As it was so long ago, I don't remember at this time. Charles Brown

Any news on possible ETAs for the the prize tiers? I haven't been able to play since Build V14.1 due to Desura being a giant prick, so I'm somewhat starved for Xenonauts interactions.

I found this quite interesting, and for some reason the guy in the video clicked with me. Lots of interesting possibilities, and his statement that with or without the funding he is going to build the game makes me believe this is a passion, not just some thing to make money. I'm going to commit, but I thought I'd put this here in case you haven't seen it, and you might help him get it made. Also a very low goal to boot! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1438429768/maia

Just asking since I have forgotten them ; And I mean ones we did achieve, I don't want to remember not achieving memorial wall/pilot portraits/reaper hive/military base terror tileset D:

I'm sure you're busy, but you really should update the Kickstarter page to show the final outcome. Potential new customers will feel better about buying if they know the project is fully funded and they're going to receive a good product.

Folks, it seems that Kickstarter (and IndieGoGo) are here to stay... to that end, and to keep Off-Topic from becoming a Dead State of Double Fine Wastelands, where our SpaceVenture is Skyjacked from the Kinetic Void... I thought it would be good to consolidate all crowd-funded game projects to a single thread that can grow forever, rather than dozens upon dozens. It would also help prevent it from feeling like our community is being spammed by well-meaning but overzealous fans (much as we were when we were out promoting Xenonauts during the tougher early days of the campaign). The threads that have already been made can probably be left alone. Moderators could choose to merge future threads into this one before they grow too large. If a project is so captivating that it threatens to take over this generic thread, a mod can split it off (i.e., it earned the right to stand alone). Also, this opens the doors to non-game projects, such as films, gadgets, etc. See something interesting? Want to share with the rest of the squad? Here's the place to do it.

NA, but please try for XXX, I'd be so grateful!

Just had the email asking for a photo for my soldier portrait etc., and the survey to go with it. With regard to the survey, how much fun can we have with it? For example could I list my soldiers' previous unit as X-COM, combat experience as Cydonia? Or should we try to remain faithful to history and the theme of the game?

Hello, I became interested in xenonauts because of paulsoaresjr. I remember him saying something to the effect of 'after the kickstarter finishes they are going to release a new beta version for everyone'. Does anyone know when this release is going to be? I apologize if my post has been answered elsewhere, I'm new here obviously. This game is awesome so far!

It's amazing but the $125,000 level has been achieved. I really hope that we can reach 140k in the last ~3 days. Anything to make this great game even better! I will say though that with all this by-hand work with sprites, any future games should have a more automated process so more resources can be directed towards other things

Quick note - my router is broken. I'm currently connecting to the net using my phone as a wifi hotspot, which is obviously not ideal given I have a 1gb monthly limit. New router arrives tomorrow, but I don't know when and I won't be on these forums until then

If I get the $75 pre-order, can I get poster and dvd game copy? If so, I'm totally going to chuck up all my money for it.

I dont know if this is hard or not to do in terms of code. It would be damn nice that above "your name" in game you could have a special portrait for it, like a photo that Xeno Devs would modify to blend (graphic wise) with the remaining "vanilla" portrait soldiers. In tactical missions it would still be vanilla because i dont want Chris team to go nuts rendering all the sprites needed.

I'm sure it's somewhere on here, but how do you reclaim rewards from the kickstarter? I don't have a Desura account and I didn't get it from there. I want to say I saw something about not getting something till after kickstarter ends, but I wounldn't bet on it. I would really like that spangly gold medal and to spend nights staying up late jamming out to the soundtrack. Also, just a little suggestion, would it be possible to allow us to be able to turn base facilites before you place them? The same for the weapon equips, it would allow for less wasted space. That's just my thoughts tho. Nice, x nay that, great game so far.

I bought the game on my credit card, but i dont know if on day of the payment i'll have credit on it (I'm a student with no money..). So I canceled and backed a couple times until I found my dad's credit card number () It will be any charges on payments that I have canceled?

I think it could be a really good idea if you guys were able to release a new demo build before the Kickstarter runs out. If you give it a few more maps (new tileset) and features, I'm pretty sure the release will be covered on gaming sites like RPS and social media like Reddit. More exposure would mean more Kickstarter funds. The big question of course is how much is release ready at the moment? A map pack shouldn't be too hard though.

OK, so the vast majority of the donations to the game have been at the $20/$30 level. Though now the portraits are done, there's not been much in the way of donations above the $100 mark, I think most of those donations are outliers anyway and require quite a lot of extra goodies that wipe out a lot of the gain. I think the most effective way of increasing the donations is to add in a new $50 reward, and try to convince the $20/$30 crowd to up their pledges. A standard boxed copy is an option at the $50 price point. We're still waiting on the quotes including the printed manuals, but the price is likely to be in the $3-4 range per copy, plus postage. Selling them for $50 wouldn't be bad. They come in print ranges of 100 so even if we're left with an extra 99 at the end, I'm sure we'll be able to sell them on the forums or on the site or something eventually. We'll put this in as an option at the $50 reward tier if so, so you can choose one instead of a T-shirt. I think most people would be very happy with that, to be honest... The other alternative is a $50 digital tier. I'm thinking that this could include two premium pre-orders for the people that don't want to have a boxed copy, allowing them to give one to a friend. Both of these rewards (and everything higher) will also get a thankyou in the closing credits of the game. This is currently at the $500 reward tier, but we'll move it to the $50 reward tier. The $500 and $1000 reward tiers will instead get thankyous on the intro movie / screen. We'll close the $5,000 reward tier too - I didn't seriously expect anyone to buy it - and give the $1,000 guy 10 copies instead of $5. Finally, as I don't think we'll sell out of the $1,000 or $5,000 tiers, which between them have 20 portraits available, I think in the last three days we'll put up an additional 10 portraits at the $200 price point. These would just include a premium pre-order and your soldier / portrait in the game. Maybe a boxed copy too. That hopefully should get a bit more excitement going for the end the of the project. Sound good to people?

With the stretch goals poll up, I think it's time to get another bit of public interest. Reddit, specifically r/gaming is great way to let people know about Xenonauts kickstarter, but it's kinda hard to get noticed there, especially if your post is not zelda/pokémon/mario/EA bashing related. I've seen few attempts to get Xenonauts noticed there, but only succes was in r/games, which is more Xenonauts target demographic, but it has much much smaller population. So I propose we get a few (the more the merrier) people together to upvote a post quickly so it can get the much needed inital impulse to get noticed. Favoured reddit posts are funny or informative, so if anyone has some cool videos from the game or pictures of a mission going horribly and hilariously wrong, it might do well. Other than that, the kickstarter stretch goals are ideal topic, so we could set up a post titled Xenonauts Kickstarter successful in 3 days! Try out free demo & vote for stretch goals like Mac/Linux port, Female soldiers and Reaper/Chryssalid hive tileset or something along these lines (suggestions welcome, I'm not much of a reporter). So, umm.. who's with me?

This is my proposal for the stretch goals. If people like them, they'll go up in a couple of hours along with a survey that allows you to vote for them in order of preference. Thoughts? - Mac / Linux port – The game will be ported onto Mac / Linux platforms for release, and hopefully for beta too. - Female soldiers – We’ll add female soldiers to the game, with 20-30 portraits and modified Basic Armour art. However the battlefield sprites will remain unisex. - Soviet Town terror tileset ($40k) – the current terror tileset is an American town. To fit with the Cold War theme, we’ll put in an alternate tileset for the Soviet bloc countries using Soviet-style architecture. - Military Base tileset ($40k) – this tileset would allow us to put military terror sites in the game, where aliens have attacked a military base and you are sent in to deal with them. - Inside missions – these would be missions where combat squads are sent into large buildings or into underground bunkers to clear out an alien strike team. We can mostly re-use the Xenonaut Base tiles for this, so this will be a $25k item. - Reaper (Chryssalid) Hive tileset ($40k) – in addition to the normal alien base missions, we will add Reaper (the Xenonaut equivalent of Chryssalids) Hive missions to the late-game. These would feature “nodes” that spawned infinite numbers of Reapers. Yes, I have been playing Space Hulk. - Tileset-Specific NPC Allies – we do have friendly AI soldiers in the game, but only one type. This would add different variants – police on the Industrial tileset, farmers with shotguns on the Farm tileset, mujahedeen with AK-47s on the Desert tileset etc. - Vehicle Combat Experience – soldiers level up with experience, vehicles do not. This would allow vehicles to increase their stats (not armour / health) by a maximum of 15% with combat experience. - Pilot Portraits and Callsigns – at the moment, the aircraft are just aircraft. This would give each aircraft a pilot portrait and a callsign, so they seem less expendable. These pilots will not level up with experience. - Human Psionics and Blaster Bombs – We’ve removed these from the game due to balance reasons, and we will not put them in Xenonauts. This stretch goal would bundle the game with a developer-made mod that allowed people to put them back in. - Memorial Screen – This would be a tab on the UI which allowed you to view a list of all your dead soldiers, including the location and time of death, their portrait and number of kills etc. - Proxy Grenades – These are fun. This would add a secondary fire function to all advanced grenades (Alenium grenades upwards) that allows them to be used as proxy grenades. - Motion Detector – This would be a one-hand soldier item that, when equipped, will display a coloured overlay on the battlefield to show any AI movement in previous turn within range of the soldier holding it. - Hire a Level Designer - we will add a lot more map variation to the game before release, but we don’t have a devoted level designer. This will let us hire one. - Tall Grass – There’s waist-high grass in X-Com. This would put it in Xenonauts too, complete with the ridiculous (yet amusing) fire mechanics from the original. The goals that involve the creation of a new tileset cost $40k instead, so if one proves most popular then it will arrive at $90k instead of $75k. This is because tilesets are surprisingly large and are EXTREMELY time consuming and expensive to make – they’re the most expensive component of the game by some distance. Given we’re only going to get about 50% of the money pledged after KS fees and the costs of manufacturing and shipping the rewards, there’s no way we can put an extra tileset in the game for a $25k stretch goal, I’m afraid. If you want to know why, it’s basically because you need a lot of tiles to make a convincing tileset that doesn’t repeat, and every single tile has to be modelled in 3D and rendered out, then hand-painted in three different variants (undamaged, damaged and destroyed) to support destructibility. Plus all the ground maps have to be painted too. It’s a LOT of work.

OK, so a few people have suggested a poll where we ask people what features they are most excited about and would like to have put in the game as rewards for us doing well. I think this is a good idea. But first, I need to know what should go in the poll. Here's a few ideas from me: - Mac / Linux port (likely to be at $100k) - Female soldiers (likely to be at $200k) - A new tileset (possibly with a sub-vote about what tileset you'd like - given we already have desert and tundra tilesets coming) - A new alien species? Although we might struggle to find one that has a good battlefield niche / ability that is not already planned. - Vehicle levelling - allowing vehicles to become slightly better with combat experience, although I'm a little unconvinced by this. - Military terror mission? Aliens are attacking a miltary base? - Mission objectives on terror missions - such as protect X civilian (the mayor etc) while the aliens are actively trying to kill them? Other ideas are welcome. I'm not keen to put pilot / aircraft experience in the game though, unfortunately. I think it'll be too tough to balance.

I am really enjoying seeing xenonauts on kickstarter. Blown away by the support. Always thought that there was no longer an apetite for games with depth. Everything is 3D graphics and FPS. I've been following xenonauts since August last year - at which point I thought this was a small community of like minded 30+ year olds. 90% funding after 2 days is incredible to see! Before the banking situation with kickstarter was sorted out, Chris was talking about going with the much smaller indiegogo. Watching xenonauts hit kickstarter, the first activity looked to be all xenonauts forum members - looking at the list of recent backers - at least 2/3rds of the backers have backed other kickerstarter projects previously. In other words many (most?) or the funds coming in are coming in from the established crowd sourcing community. It goes to show how important accessing kickstarter has been for the project (over some of the other possible forums). BTW muchos kudos Kilrathi, on providing the bank account route that enabled this to happen. I think for me this is the stand out community contribution so far.