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Xenonauts 2: Soldiers & Vehicles


Chris

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Your soldiers and vehicles are the brave heroes that face plasma-death in battle against the aliens every time you run a mission. Our plans for these units have also changed over time, with the original idea being to give them simplified attributes and inventory system and then add a skill system on top of that. The simplifications we made to attributes and the inventory proved pretty unpopular with players and the skill system was difficult to visualise (there's already a ridiculous amount of information on-screen on Soldier Equip screen), so we decided to move back to the X1 setup with a few carefully chosen additions.

The systems are:

  • Inventory & Secondary Slot
  • Stat Modifiers
  • Vehicles
  • Further Ideas

Inventory & Secondary Slot:
The soldier inventory system now works much like it did in the first Xenonauts, except units now have an additional "secondary weapon" inventory slot (they can carry an item in their secondary slot even if they have a 2-handed weapon equipped in their primary slot). This slot is limited to small items - pistols, melee weapons, medikits, etc. 

This is a usability change more than anything else. In X1 if you had an injured soldier it was pretty annoying to have to open their backpack to see if they had a Medikit, and if they did then you'd have to drag it into their primary slot and use it, then open the backpack again and move it back into the backpack and re-equip your primary weapon. Same if you wanted to get out a stun baton and stun an alien; it usually involved a lot of needless backpack interaction. With the new system it's very easy to see which units have which items and using a secondary item only involves a couple of clicks.

The backpack and belt are still fully functional and if you want to load your soldiers up with lots of additional weapons and ammo like you could in the first Xenonauts 1, you can still do that. This change only expands the inventory system, it doesn't take anything away from it!

Stat Modifiers:
The new modular armour system (explained in the Research thread) has much more robust support for stat modifiers than we had in X1, so pretty much any item can be used to positively or negatively modify the stats of the soldier carrying that item. What this means in practice is that you can customise your soldiers for their role more than was possible in the original Xenonauts.

For example, each suit of armour has a light and heavy variant available so you can opt for more protection at the cost of more weight, but the light variant of the end-game exosuit also provides a TU bonus. Once you reach the mid-game there are helmets that offer reduced protection, but grant an Accuracy bonus to the wearer. If a soldier is likely to be exposed to dangerous environmental effects, you can issue them a Rebreather which slightly reduces their Accuracy but makes them immune to gas damage.

It's possible that this system could see other uses, too - for example, maybe using a shotgun could grant you extra Time Units. I'm not completely sure this is a good idea (it's a bit "gamey"), but those options are now available to us in a way that they weren't previously. I suspect modders will be very interested in taking advantage of them too!

Vehicles:
Vehicles in X2 are now smaller, filling only a single tile and replacing only a single soldier in the dropship - although the number of vehicles that can be carried is limited by the dropship type (with more advanced dropships allowing more vehicles). This allows vehicles to be more consistently useful by letting them enter small spaces, and although an individual single-tile vehicle is less powerful than the larger 3x3 equivalent from in X1 it is still be faster, tougher and better armed than a soldier (there's quite a bit of cost and research time involved in producing vehicles and keeping them upgraded). 

The other major change to vehicles is that they too are now somewhat modular and upgradeable. The starting vehicle has two possible configurations even when first built: a light variant that has less armour but has more TUs, and a heavy variant that is tougher but slower. Instead of having to build a whole new vehicle every few missions because new technology the old one becomes obselete, you can instead run upgrade projects to improve the armour on existing vehicles to keep them relevant. Vehicles now have a wider selection of weapons available and also have a secondary slot, which can mount a weaker secondary weapon or support items like defensive smoke grenades or a rangefinder that increases the accuracy of the primary weapon.

There's a design choice to be made about how many vehicle types we add to the game. At the moment there's two vehicles: the early-game tracked vehicle and then a late-game hovertank. However, it almost seems more sensible to just have a single vehicle type and make everything an upgrade - I think it'd be cool to be able to keep the same vehicle throughout the whole game, slowly converting it from a small tracked drone to an armoured hovertank. We'll make that decision based on playtesting later on in development.

Further Ideas:

  • Stress / Fatigue: at one point we had a fatigue system in the game to encourage players to rotate their soldiers. It's been disabled for a while so would probably need a bit of work to get working again, but we're planning to give it a test once the game is fully playable to see if it adds anything to the gameplay experience.
  • Stat Caps / Diminishing Returns: one of the issues with the X1 soldier stat system is that any stat can reach 100 no matter what level it begins at, so having high starting values doesn't give that much effect. In X2 we're currently using a system where a soldier can only gain 30 points in any attribute, which makes the starting values more meaningful. Having a hard cap is probably a bit too harsh, though, so we'll probably move to a system where soldiers get diminishing returns as they gain skill points - so gaining 10 skill points is easy, gaining the next 10 is harder, etc. This means units with low starting stats can still reach 100 but would require a lot of missions (or training) to do so.
  • Casualty List: One of the new features in Xenonauts: Community Edition was the addition of a casualty list that displayed all the soldiers you had lost, their medals, what date and mission they were lost on, etc. It's a small thing but we're planning to add it into X2 before the game ships.
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  • 2 weeks later...

Love the ideas, however one stands out to me that raises some concern.

Part of the fun of X-COM/Xenonauts to me has always been my attachment to certain soldiers (and their inevitable demises at the hands of a slightly incompetent commander).

The system you suggest of putting a hard cap on soldier progression in stats would trouble me greatly, as it would mean some soldiers would be guaranteed to be incompetent later-game. I wouldn't mind making it harder to grow as they get further from their original values, but it would be nice to have the reward of keeping soldiers alive and going on more than just the required missions stay in the game.

All in all, hard cap would really affect the experience for me, but I could see how the other system you suggested where it gets harder to improve skills as they go further from their original values could be interesting(hopefully not being so restrictive that some soldiers are screwed from ever having perfect stats anyway if they start a little lower).

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On 5/20/2020 at 7:38 PM, Chris said:


Vehicles in X2 are now smaller, filling only a single tile and replacing only a single soldier in the dropship - although the number of vehicles that can be carried is limited by the dropship type (with more advanced dropships allowing more vehicles). This allows vehicles to be more consistently useful by letting them enter small spaces, and although an individual single-tile vehicle is less powerful than the larger 3x3 equivalent from in X1 it is still be faster, tougher and better armed than a soldier (there's quite a bit of cost and research time involved in producing vehicles and keeping them upgraded). 

 

I love any other features in this thread except this one i'm not so sure, as i mentioned in other thread I still miss the old 3x3 tile "armoured vehicle", and think it would be cool and challenging if aliens have same kinda tanks for a open invasion and we have to use better assets to deal with them. Not that I'm complaining the decision or asking to bring it back, but I'm just not sure that while using actually small UGV robots as so-called "vehicle", and for me the only advantages are they are tough, have heavy weapons and expendable, what is the point for players to employ these robots if human soldiers can actually have upgraded armour, can equip rocket launchers or LMGs that are just slightly weaker than robot mounted weaponries, and are actually expendable as well. This might be my own issue about robotic assets in such genre because I also found myself having the same attitude towards things like SPARK/MECs in XCOM2, but after all the UGVs are choiceable, so I'll just stay with a all-human squad and see what the UGVs would have in the final build.

 

Also for the Fatigue system, I hope the system can remember several build of squads (like saving squad 1 and squad 2), so that while the squad 1 needs rotation you can easily choose a entire squad 2 to exchange them, instead of dragging individual soldiers to dropships from a list of names.

Edited by EurekaSeven
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Here I can speak as an Beta-Tester too, because we could test some of that in the Betas:

1. The Refit with the Inventory-Slots / Backpacks were needed. That was and is the best Decission the Devs could do for the Soldiers. Now they are real Soldiers again.

2. The Vehicles are a very good Reinforcement to the Soldiers. The Vehicles are a must have for every Combat-Team you have on Ground-Missions, because they are Multi-Role. You can use them as Artillery (Rockets / Grenades), as close Combat-Fighters (Heavy MG´s), Spotter and much more. And if you get them Armor you can use the Vehicles as Cover for your Soldiers too. Like already mentioned the Vehicles are fully modular and upgradable.

But they are implemented firstly in Beta 10 or 11, which means they need a lot of bugfixing until Beta 13. We will see in Beta 13 how good the Bugfixing get done.

3. Stat Modifiers grow very slowly until the Betas, because the Soldiers couldn´t train. You could build up the Training Center in your Base / Bases but it had no effect until Beta 7 or 8 until now. Only in the first Betas with the old Main Base (5 to 7 or 8) the Training Center was useable. So we Beta-Testers haven´t any Datas on the Stats, because the Soldiers growed very slowly in only Ground Combats, which aren´t neaningfull enough.

4. The Stress / Fatigute System is a very good Idea. It´s working in XCOM2 and Phoenix Point very good. You have to switch your Soldiers that everyone has a chance to fight and get Experiance. Why not implement here, which gives more replayability and makes Groudn Fights / Ground Missions much more interesteing. I´m exited to see it in the Game. Love that in XCOM 2 and Phoenix Point. And most important: It´s realistic. A tired soldiers can´t fight and the Mission get lost. The same with medium and heavy wounded soldiers.

5. The Stat Caps / Diminishing Returns System have to implemented too, which like the Stress / Fatigute System makes the Game much more realistic. You won´t have perfect Soldiers, you have to specialice them. :D

6. The Causalty List is nice to have, because it remembers the other living Comrades / Soldiers what failures they have to cancel. And it improves the Willpower to save the Humanity.

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  • 6 months later...
On 5/20/2020 at 12:38 PM, Chris said:

Once you reach the mid-game there are helmets that offer reduced protection, but grant an Accuracy bonus to the wearer. If a soldier is likely to be exposed to dangerous environmental effects, you can issue them a Rebreather which slightly reduces their Accuracy but makes them immune to gas damage.

When putting on a gas mask and night vision device, the soldier's performance does not change, or the changes are not displayed in the characteristics window.

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The Gas Mask have an Effect with the Smoke-, Stun- and similar Grenades. Soldiers with a Gas Mask get a secure against dirty Air (I call it so as Explenation), but an penalty in Shooting / Throwing things.

It´s like you put on an Standard-Mask against the Corona-Virus, where you can breath not normal and have to put down the Mask as soon as possible.

The Night Vision I haven´t tried yet, so I can´t say anything about it.

 

 

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23 hours ago, Alienkiller said:

Soldiers with a Gas Mask get a secure against dirty Air

I understand why the gas mask was created. The description says that it reduces the accuracy of soldiers, but not how much. When using the mask, the accuracy parameter of the selected soldier does not change in the skills window.

In previous versions, night vision added 10 accuracy, which could be seen in the skills window when equipped.

But in the current 15.4 when it equipped, the accuracy parameter remains the same.

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Yep, sometimes it get shown and in the next Version not. That´s why it´s called Beta to implement and test several things and the Best testet will be implemented as well as Optimised for the Early Access Release or the Final Game.

I have seen that too and know that the Devs will Optimise all existing things and all other to have implemented (missing Research; missing Production; Base-, Vehicle-, Airplanes-, and Soldier-Upgrades etc.) now in the next minimum 3 to about 5 / 6 Major Builds incl. Hotfixes for the Early Access Release

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  • 5 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
On 5/20/2020 at 12:38 PM, Chris said:

Vehicles:

Equipment and soldiers in the game differ only in the presence/absence of inventory, the power of weapons and the growth of skills. In terms of tactical capabilities, these are almost identical units. It would be nice to make the soldiers more tactically adapted. Add the soldier the ability to lie down on the ground, thereby hiding from the fire of the aliens almost out of the blue. Tanks are not capable of this.

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1 hour ago, Komandos said:

Equipment and soldiers in the game differ only in the presence/absence of inventory, the power of weapons and the growth of skills. In terms of tactical capabilities, these are almost identical units. It would be nice to make the soldiers more tactically adapted. Add the soldier the ability to lie down on the ground, thereby hiding from the fire of the aliens almost out of the blue. Tanks are not capable of this.

IDK, breaking walls with a vehicle gives interesting opportunities and they are also the superior scout unit. The weaponry also differs form soldiers and they have no permadeath. That's just what I think. Also I don't see what other interesting stuff you can do with vehicles.

Edited by geno
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  • 4 weeks later...
On 5/20/2020 at 11:38 AM, Chris said:

There's a design choice to be made about how many vehicle types we add to the game. At the moment there's two vehicles: the early-game tracked vehicle and then a late-game hovertank. However, it almost seems more sensible to just have a single vehicle type and make everything an upgrade - I think it'd be cool to be able to keep the same vehicle throughout the whole game, slowly converting it from a small tracked drone to an armoured hovertank. We'll make that decision based on playtesting later on in development.

Yes: Havign a single plattform makes more sense and does not lead to outdated/unused assets. If there is already a modular unit it dos not make sense to create maintain assets that lack the advantages of the former (development as well as mechanic wise)

Wether a MARS unit is tracked or is placed on a hover platform should depend on its loadout alone and in case of units the space occupied by the unit coudl even change (unlike that of buildings when upgraded). Thus a MARS unit could take up 4 spaces isntead of a single space when using a hover-platform acting as a kind of limitation to using this very advantageious platform (as it keeps the unit safe from all melee attacks and is a great boost to movement and provides higher ground)

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  • 3 months later...

Does the same infrastructure exist within X2 for one weapon to use different ammo types? I have yet to see it in what YouTube videos I've seen on gameplay, and it'd be a tragedy to lose that option from a modding perspective.

Secondly, do the aliens share this primary/secondary system? Can a sniper Harridan switch to a weaker arm gun secondary when caught outflanked? I think this would neat, and give the AI a bit more flexibility without ruining specialization. (Arguably, it would allow you to double down on weapon specialization.)

Edited by Woz2
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The Game is still in Development and not all Features/ Implementations etc. are in yet or the already Tested ones get upgraded.

We Betatesters announced the same suggestion with more Ammunition-Variants for the Weapons, especially the Standard, Accellerated and Gauss.

Yeah good Eyes. The AI is in that not where we wanna have it. The Devs and Betatesters working on it with several other Job-Sites.

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On 5/20/2020 at 12:38 PM, Chris said:
  • Stat Caps / Diminishing Returns: one of the issues with the X1 soldier stat system is that any stat can reach 100 no matter what level it begins at, so having high starting values doesn't give that much effect. In X2 we're currently using a system where a soldier can only gain 30 points in any attribute, which makes the starting values more meaningful. Having a hard cap is probably a bit too harsh, though, so we'll probably move to a system where soldiers get diminishing returns as they gain skill points - so gaining 10 skill points is easy, gaining the next 10 is harder, etc. This means units with low starting stats can still reach 100 but would require a lot of missions (or training) to do so. 
  •  

 

 

This feature is good, all soldiers can and should reach peek performance. But please dont add that failed feature of xcom where soldiers with 80 and 90% percent accuracy miss 3 times in a row. I would rather see a 60%, which still is unrealistic by military standards unless you are a rookie, that succeeds 6 out of 10 times instead of a 90% that misses most of the time. Xcom devs where to lazy to fix that instead opting for the failed its xcom baby crap.

 

As far as weight penalties you could tie those with strength, when a a soldier reaches 50-60-70 strength these penalties should be non existent.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Frankly, and I know this is a hot take, but I love the idea of fatigue/stress in my soldiers.

Think of it like this, lets say you have a main squad, you have alpha squad, and they get really good and you dump all your best research and equipment into them. Of course you get attached, cause who wouldn't? The more you get attached the more you give, and uh-oh the player is putting all their eggs in one basket. They send alpha squad into a mission and they get sloppy, or they make a tactical mistake, or they just get unlucky, and most if not all of the squad is down. 

The player has been riding high with this main group, and now that they're gone the player is either going to cry foul and say the game is unfair, and that it's not balanced (which happens sometimes, its in the nature of the genre) or they save scum, ruining their own fun, cause players will always optimize the fun out of something (Or they take the L).

Having fatigue or stress fixes this by forcing the player to use more than one group of people. Whenever I play XCOM or X1 and I do run a main squad and it sucks having this huge organization riding on the back of one ships worth of troopers just for them to die, and I either have to start a new game or reload a save, either because the game is unbeatable after losing everything I had, or the game feels unbeatable cause so much effort is gone to waste. These games give the option to have more than one dropship in a base, but I never do.

Limiting the amount of times a soldier can be deployed like in FE: Thracia 776 or Phoenix Point funnily enough forces the player to have more than one option when deploying. In X1 there's no risk to deployment other than the fact that the troops may not come back, but if the they get stresses/fatigued, that's something else you have to consider. The player will be forced to have more than one squad of soldiers, the player has to keep a steady flow of fresh recruits in order to stay on top performance, maybe the player will end up with more elite units now that they're using more of them, and, in the case that I had with both Thracia and PP, if the player loses an elite unit, the blow will be lessened when they come back and find another one all refreshed and ready to take the other's place. 

On 6/1/2020 at 2:17 PM, Rusknight said:

I absolutly hate this idea. I put so much time and efforts into creating my ideal squad (its like building your character in any RPG game) and then you prevent me from playing with it - horrible

People are probably going to say "well what if I want to play with a main squad, that's how I want to play the game, and they're not letting me." This is probably going to sound harsh, but if you want that feel, why not just play the firaxis XCOMs? They do a much better job with the feel of having a main squad. Ever since the og XCOM you were always meant to have a cold view of your soldiers, no matter how good they get they may not come home, and so long as that's the case a game like Xenonauts will never truly match the feeling of "building your character in any RPG game" the same way an actual RPG, or a game that's centered around a main squad will. 

I'll at least settle with an option to have fatigue, I feel like that would be the least offensive way to add this system.

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I agree, the stress mechanic definitely fixes one of my main issues with xcom as a whole. Xcom is about a global organization with the support of all the world's nations defending the world from a seemingly unstoppable threat from above, but that contradicts most of the gameplay because you are sending in the same 8-12 guys every mission. With the stress mechanic, it feels a lot more like an army like something a global defense organization would have, not just 10 guys sitting in the barracks. It also reduces grinding, which should make the game better overall. 

However, I don't like how fatigue was imemented into tharacia 776. Fire emblem does not have any way if supporting units that are on the bench, which is meaningful when you are not gaining any stats or building weapon ranks while you are doing so, and it is completely built around funneling exp into a small squad of units instead of an army.. This is why I think a stress/fatigue mechanic only works if you have a soldier training mechanic there to facilitate it. 

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  • 3 months later...
On 20.05.2020 at 12:38, Chris said:

Stress / Fatigue:

Potentially, this can add intrigue to the game, but only with a large number of ground battles in a short period of time. When the forces of the fighters may simply not be enough for all combat tasks and the Player will have to make a choice: either keep more tactical teams at military bases, or ignore part of the battles (military missions).

However: with a large number of battles, it is necessary (first of all) to diversify the tactics of these battles, as well as the goals and objectives of these battles (types of military missions), so that ground battles do not turn into a boring routine.

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ss_3f89e202fe180dcbb1f4cda67f9f5604107ab075.thumb.jpg.f93ee9060eb5fea0b531bb99828eeac6.jpg

The transport can accommodate a team of up to 16 soldiers. However, only 10 soldiers can be displayed in the list in the screenshot. Why can't the list size be increased to 16 soldiers? (So that the player doesn't waste time scrolling through the list). There is enough space here to increase the size of the list.

1708939843_Xenonauts2021-12-1122-30-55-51.thumb.jpg.810b6bd8a32c5799105cef82e8e3f15a.jpg

Edited by Komandos
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On 20.05.2020 at 12:38, Chris said:

This is a usability change more than anything else. In X1 if you had an injured soldier it was pretty annoying to have to open their backpack to see if they had a Medikit, and if they did then you'd have to drag it into their primary slot and use it, then open the backpack again and move it back into the backpack and re-equip your primary weapon. Same if you wanted to get out a stun baton and stun an alien; it usually involved a lot of needless backpack interaction. With the new system it's very easy to see which units have which items and using a secondary item only involves a couple of clicks.

Medical soldiers can be marked with a white helmet with a red cross. Soldiers armed with special equipment should also be marked with distinctive signs in appearance. (Helmet of a special color). At the moment, the combat role of soldiers is reflected only by badges (shield, stormtrooper, sniper, grenadier), but they are not visible on the battlefield.

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Edited by Komandos
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  • 8 months later...

I would much rather see diminishing returns rather than hard stat caps. Having soldiers always able to improve (albeit with more work) makes sense. Though I would hope those diminishing returns stop at a point. So it gets harder and harder up to a point, and then flattens out and is always "that hard" to advance.

 

The stamina idea is terrible. XCOM did that, to force players to rotate troops. And the mod to remove that feature ended up being one of the most downloaded of all time. lol

We have enough trouble getting a decent force put together. Forcing us to give them all downtime and try to manage multiple forces from a base is just cruelty. Also, we get attached to our soldiers who start doing well. Being told we're not allowed to use them doesn't go over well.

 

As far as vehicles go, I think that having three and using your modular idea works well. Have the vehicles be the "core", where we start with a basic one, get an advanced on, and then end up with our end game model. On this core you would add propulsion (so start off with just wheels and treads). We could then research better versions of those (so wheels with more movement, etc and tank treads made of alien alloy to be tougher) as well as researching the hover tech later in the game. Along with that, we'd have different weapons that could be mounted on the vehicle. So we'd have our starter core, with say a single small weapon slot, and some spots for upgrades (like armor or medpacks so anyone next to the vehicle can bandage up). We'd get a second version mid game, made of alien alloys, with a bigger gun spot. And finally end up with our Xenonauts masterpiece, made of the best tech, that has say two gun spots on it, and more equipment slots for bonuses. And each of those can switch propulsion and weapons as we please.

 

Also, please give us a lot more control over the customization of our characters. Let us rename them as in X1, but also let us change the face (would simply be a portrait/head swap from a big list of all available). As well, let us change the nationality. So that way we can make the soldiers we want to see (like having a squad leader from your home country).

Edited by Lord Blade
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The Chars are Founder-Chars, so no Change on them allowed. That’s the unlimited Copyright  from the Founders and Devs. Means if someone other lays hand on them (Modder f.e.) get much Problems.


We like the Stamina-Idea about s it’s realism. The Soldier / Specialist needs a short or long break (and if someone works in such an Job like f. e. Policeman, Firefighters, Doctor, Military in Action) can understand that. Especially the ones which do or did such Jobs.

All others have to do such Jobs first for a Year or so without a break and can then decide about that.

The Mod to kill the realistic important Stamina-Effects in XCOM 2 comes from unrealistic Humans.

Stamina-Effects you have in the new XCOM-Row, Phoenix Point and Xenonauts 2. It´s not unrealistic that such an System comes too in the UFO-ET-Row too to make it more interresting and much more important realistic.


The most interesting thing of the Game Xenonauts 2 is not to make unnecessary Ground Missions (like every UFO-Chrash-Site). You have to make the important Missions (interesting Crash and Landing-Sites, Terror, Bases, Specials and so on), which come more often then you think.

 

What the Stats belongs, build up the Training-Center (normally 1 is enough, in Case 2) and give your Specialists time to train. Then the Stats grow up slowly but Steadily. An similar cool Thing came in the UNI-Mod for UFO 1 ET (Standard- / Gold-Version).

 

The Vehicles are a cool Stuff and the Vehicle-Upgrades (Weapons, Armor, Technology) came up the first time with the new XCOM-Row. The UFO-ET-Row (UFO 2 ET, UFO 1 ET-Refit) and Xenonauts 2 are the first new Games which make this System very interresting and bring out the best of the best what can be done in that Sector. I can´t see what can be done better in that for the next Decades+.

Edited by Alienkiller
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