Xenonauts V1.04 Released!

[Chris]

This patch is being released first on the Experimental Branch. There will be another patch in a couple of days, too, which address some of the other ground combat crashes we're still working on (teleporter crash etc). V1.05 is therefore likely to be the final version of the game.

We've also reworked the funding on the easier difficulty settings a bit, as there's been a lot of feedback on this issue both here and on the Steam forums. We said we weren't planning on making any more balance changes but we've made an exception for this issue as new many players really seem to struggle with the economy.

FIXES:

• Soldier Equip screen crash bug is fixed!
  
• We've disabled the game's stat tracking module - I thought we'd done this months ago when the tickbox was removed from the launcher, but apparently not. This may prevent some of the extremely long load times occurring.
  
• The Loss screen should display when you lose the game, rather than freezing the game up (for real this time).
  
• The final mission no longer crashes when you escape with your final soldier, making victory a little more climactic...
  
• Aliens should now be able to attack your secondary bases as well as your primary base.
  
• There are no longer crashes associated with the Fury using its Singularity Torpedo.
  
• Heavy Drones no longer crash the game if destroyed while against the edge of a map.
  
• Shock batons no longer show a tiny picture of a shotgun in their reload slot
  
• Some mis-set tiles (impassible damaged doors etc) have been fixed
  
• Some Xenopedia / strings typos fixed
  

BALANCE:

• Funding damage inflicted by UFOs now scales with difficulty - 0.5x / 0.75x / 1x / 1.25x on Easy / Normal / Veteran / Insane
  
• Alien invasion escalation (i.e. the speed at which older UFO types are replaced by newer designs) has been sped up on Easy and Normal, so it is not much different to Veteran.
  
• Funding events occur twice as often but do half as much funding damage as before.
  
• Air Superiority missions are back, so Ground Attack missions have been nerfed slightly.
  
• Alien bases now have a 100% chance of discovery every 5 days, rather than a 20% of discovery. This should stop them invisibly ruining your game with their continual funding drain if you repeatedly fail the detection check.
  
• Ground combat missions on shot-down UFOs now give more Alien Alloys
  
• Ground combat missions should give about 20% less money
  
• Airstrike reward values increased
  
• National funding multipliers reduced a little
  

The intention is that Veteran difficulty stays at relatively the same difficulty with regards to funding, but with slightly more Alloys made available and the pressure to do every single mission being reduced (i.e. the results of Airstrikes and a ground combat mission have been more closely aligned).

Normal and Easy difficulties have been made easier, as it is now harder to lose nations to UFO activity. The alien invasion escalation has been sped up too, as it was making the game more tedious instead of less difficult. The invasion is now nearly as fast as on Veteran but you'll have more resources to deal with it.

[ventuswings]

Aliens should now be able to attack your secondary bases as well as your primary base.

Nice! I woke up today thinking that I should suggest this being looked at, so it was a nice surprise to see the solution already implemented even before I asked haha.

[StellarRat]

These sound like great changes! So, what caused the soldier equip crash? I'm curious from a programmer standpoint since it was such a tricky bug.

PS. Having a great time playing!

Love, StellarRat

Edited June 10, 2014 by StellarRat

[vaultdweller]

• Ground combat missions on shot-down UFOs now give more Alien Alloys

• Airstrike reward values increased

What kind of magnitude of change did you go with? Similar in scale to the 20% reduction in combat rewards?

[Lt_Parsons]

@StellarRat - Giovanni described this long awaited fix here - http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/10238-Soldier-Equip-Screen-Crash?p=116046&viewfull=1#post116046

[StellarRat]

@StellarRat - Giovanni described this long awaited fix here - http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/10238-Soldier-Equip-Screen-Crash?p=116046&viewfull=1#post116046

Excellent!

[kabill]

Blegh, all the mod updates to do (but awesome change log nevertheless!).

[bills6693]

Nice. As a brand new player (who never played original X-Com, and is playing on normasl), most of my problems should probably be fixed now. When 1.05 goes to the stable branch I'll probably jump back in tbh.

Airstrikes giving more and ground missions less will help cover more of the world with air-only bases early on, and along with the other changes it will hopefully reduce the damage being done to nations causing them to leave me before I could possibly protect them (in my eyes... unless I spent NO money other than new bases?)

[Skitso]

The game feels pretty darn solid now. Great job! I played almost 10 hours yesterday and didn't have a single issue or annoyance.

[Selgald]

Yes the game is pretty solid now. But I had one big issue yesterday, I forgot to eat the whole day because I was doing one test playthrough ^^

[redmage]

I reported a bug with the soldier management screen not being able to see new hires. I got a response that this was a known bug, yet I don't see any fix for it in the 1.04 release notes. This is kind of a show stopper here. What's the release schedule for fixing this bug?

-- redmage

This patch is being released first on the Experimental Branch. There will be another patch in a couple of days, too, which address some of the other ground combat crashes we're still working on (teleporter crash etc). V1.05 is therefore likely to be the final version of the game.

We've also reworked the funding on the easier difficulty settings a bit, as there's been a lot of feedback on this issue both here and on the Steam forums. We said we weren't planning on making any more balance changes but we've made an exception for this issue as new many players really seem to struggle with the economy.

FIXES:

• Soldier Equip screen crash bug is fixed!
  
• We've disabled the game's stat tracking module - I thought we'd done this months ago when the tickbox was removed from the launcher, but apparently not. This may prevent some of the extremely long load times occurring.
  
• The Loss screen should display when you lose the game, rather than freezing the game up (for real this time).
  
• The final mission no longer crashes when you escape with your final soldier, making victory a little more climactic...
  
• Aliens should now be able to attack your secondary bases as well as your primary base.
  
• There are no longer crashes associated with the Fury using its Singularity Torpedo.
  
• Heavy Drones no longer crash the game if destroyed while against the edge of a map.
  
• Shock batons no longer show a tiny picture of a shotgun in their reload slot
  
• Some mis-set tiles (impassible damaged doors etc) have been fixed
  
• Some Xenopedia / strings typos fixed
  

BALANCE:

• Funding damage inflicted by UFOs now scales with difficulty - 0.5x / 0.75x / 1x / 1.25x on Easy / Normal / Veteran / Insane
  
• Alien invasion escalation (i.e. the speed at which older UFO types are replaced by newer designs) has been sped up on Easy and Normal, so it is not much different to Veteran.
  
• Funding events occur twice as often but do half as much funding damage as before.
  
• Air Superiority missions are back, so Ground Attack missions have been nerfed slightly.
  
• Alien bases now have a 100% chance of discovery every 5 days, rather than a 20% of discovery. This should stop them invisibly ruining your game with their continual funding drain if you repeatedly fail the detection check.
  
• Ground combat missions on shot-down UFOs now give more Alien Alloys
  
• Ground combat missions should give about 20% less money
  
• Airstrike reward values increased
  
• National funding multipliers reduced a little
  

The intention is that Veteran difficulty stays at relatively the same difficulty with regards to funding, but with slightly more Alloys made available and the pressure to do every single mission being reduced (i.e. the results of Airstrikes and a ground combat mission have been more closely aligned).

Normal and Easy difficulties have been made easier, as it is now harder to lose nations to UFO activity. The alien invasion escalation has been sped up too, as it was making the game more tedious instead of less difficult. The invasion is now nearly as fast as on Veteran but you'll have more resources to deal with it.

[Frogman]

I seem to have lost the tileset for urban (or maybe it is suburban, its all lush green and villas) terror sites, I had Skitsos map pack installed and reinstalled it but doesnt seem to work.

edit:

To clarify, the sprites for the characters, dropship and the UI are all correct, but everything around is just pitch black.

Edited June 10, 2014 by Frogman

[Chris]

You'll need to delete your /maps/ folder, then verify your game integrity.

[Chris]

@redmage - Use your mousewheel to scroll down the list, or just assign the soldiers in the Soldier Equip screen instead (they're under Unassigned). The broken scrollbar is a known issue but it's not a show-stopping bug by any means.

[Frogman]

brilliant, now I can get back to saving the world. The people of Earth thank you.

[domein]

Were self damaging shots from pulse cannon hunter car fixed? It was routinely blasting terrain right in front of itself last time I played a few versions ago.

[StellarRat]

Were self damaging shots from pulse cannon hunter car fixed? It was routinely blasting terrain right in front of itself last time I played a few versions ago.

That hasn't happened to me and I use vehicles a lot. I think it's fixed. Of course, if you aim close OR there is intervening cover in the way, you can still kill yourself. The game won't keep you from doing something stupid.

[Caaygun]

[*]Soldier Equip screen crash bug is fixed!

Great! Now it feels like the game is getting close to being done.

[*]Alien bases now have a 100% chance of discovery every 5 days, rather than a 20% of discovery. This should stop them invisibly ruining your game with their continual funding drain if you repeatedly fail the detection check.

I'm completely against this. They should remain hidden if not within radar range. It should require for the player to meticulously path interceptors to scan the uncovered area for bases where funding consistently drops. That's how the OG was, and that's the right way to do it IMHO.

[sage]

Wonky LOS fix?

I've repeatedly run into problems with wonky line-of-sight killing my troopers. The most common case is that my trooper can't shoot an alien that it CAN see; but the alien CAN shoot the trooper. This seems to always happen where there's a corner involved.

After playing through half-a-dozen tactical battles and having more than half of my casualties due to this, I rage-quit, and haven't been playing. But that's a bummer, because the game seems really good other than that!

[doctorfrog]

Nice. As a brand new player (who never played original X-Com, and is playing on normasl), most of my problems should probably be fixed now. When 1.05 goes to the stable branch I'll probably jump back in tbh.

Same kind of player here, do we know what the stable timetable is?

[StellarRat]

Wonky LOS fix?

I've repeatedly run into problems with wonky line-of-sight killing my troopers. The most common case is that my trooper can't shoot an alien that it CAN see; but the alien CAN shoot the trooper. This seems to always happen where there's a corner involved.

After playing through half-a-dozen tactical battles and having more than half of my casualties due to this, I rage-quit, and haven't been playing. But that's a bummer, because the game seems really good other than that!

That's intentional. The problem is that it's not very intuitive because of the way it's displayed. It's supposed to simulate someone leaning around a corner and firing. If you want to be safe always stand one tile further back from a corner than you think you need to.

[Chris]

We may look again at the LOS, but we'll only do it when everything else is done and the game is otherwise finished. Messing with the LOS usually causes havoc and I'm not risking delays / instability by doing so.

[OzoneGrif]

Very nice!

Alien bases now have a 100% chance of discovery every 5 days, rather than a 20% of discovery. This should stop them invisibly ruining your game with their continual funding drain if you repeatedly fail the detection check.

Please, not 100% on Veteran or higher.

I like to have to send my planes manually over land to search for Alien bases.

Just make sure that if a plane flies above an alien base, it's discovered

[domein]

Use rocket launcher, it is fun and takes care of cover.

[Solver]

Great changelist overall!

A bit surprised to see the alien base detection change, and I liked searching for them with planes. I thought they were already easy to detect just by watching in between waves and seeing funding drop 1k per day on some continent. But I suppose that people who aren't aware of that may have hidden bases for way too long.