Chris Posted July 16, 2023 Share Posted July 16, 2023 The most frequent question we get asked is “what are the differences between Xenonauts 2 and the first Xenonauts?” For most people, the answer "It's a much more polished game that covers similar events, with quite a bit of new content" will be fine. But if you want precise detail on what the new features are (big and small) then we've provided this list for you. Remember we’re only just starting Early Access, so there will be a further 9+ months of new features / content before the game releases too! General: The game has customisable campaign difficulty options, so you can independently change the difficulty on the strategy and tactical layers and enable / disable various gameplay systems based on your own preferences. Easier difficulty settings disable some classic X-Com game mechanics that can catch out newer players (e.g. rotating while shooting does not cost Time Units, etc). These are enabled on harder difficulty settings, or can be manually toggled based on player preference. The game has a starting cinematic, and once complete will also have an ending cinematic. The three main game characters (the Commander, the Chief Scientist, and the Operations Director) now chat to each other at various points in the game, meaning not all narrative has to be delivered via research text. The game includes a tutorial that explains the essential combat and strategic mechanics, and sets the scene for the start of the game. The game has extensive tooltips. The support nested links to make browsing information easier (as seen in Crusader Kings 3, Old World, etc). There’s also contextual pop-up notifications for new players that explain important but somewhat obscure mechanics / controls as they occur (e.g. RMB to open doors without walking through them, how stun damage and unconsciousness works, etc). The game now supports translation, and is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (Simplified + Traditional) The UI font size is larger than in the first game, meaning there should be few instances of unreadably small text. Although the game is designed for 16:9 formats, there’s much better support for non-standard resolutions (particularly ultrawide aspect ratios like 21:9) The game now has achievements. Tactical Combat: The game uses a modern 3D engine (Unity), so the graphics are significantly better than the first game although we’ve retained the isometric camera and readable battlefields. The camera can be rotated (using Q / E) The camera can be zoomed (using Pg Up / Pg Down) The tactical UI has been completely redesigned. All of the weapons, grenades, reload options and other actions available to a soldier are now visible at a glance without having to open the soldier inventory. Mission objectives are always shown in the top left of the screen. Pressing space now marks the current soldier as “done”, and selects the next closest soldier. Once all soldiers are done, your turn will end. Pressing space when a unit is moving will massively speed up their movement animation. If you haven’t interacted with one of your soldiers and try to press End Turn, the game will notify you (right-clicking End Turn skips this check). There’s a number of new tactical mission types that don’t just revolve around “Kill all the bad guys”, which means the gameplay is much more varied than the first game: Recover Intelligence: this mission type gives you a certain number of turns to break into an enemy building and recover a number of items before enemy reinforcements begin to spawn. Abduction: this mission type contains a number of captured humans in abduction pods, and you must find and free as many as possible before the timer runs out and they are teleported back to the alien homeworld. You win the mission if you free at least half of the humans (which isn’t too hard) but you get better rewards if you free more of them. Eliminate VIP: this mission type requires the player to find and eliminate an enemy VIP, then retreat before enemy reinforcements overwhelm you. There’s also capturable items on the map to recover. The final mission is a two-parter, and this time you actually get to visit the alien homeworld (which I think is important for a game called “Xenonauts”). Many of the aliens from the first game return (usually with a visual refresh), but others are entirely new. This new enemies include the “Cleaners”, a new human faction that assist the aliens and have their own series of plot missions. We’ve made an effort to give each alien type a “chunkier” ability that makes facing them in combat more of a tactical puzzle (something XCOM did really well). Aliens now have three tiers of weapons available to them rather than one. There should be more variety in the maps compared to the first game for several reasons. There’s more map biomes than the original game. New biomes include the Jungle, the Dockyard and the Boreal biome. There’s already a few more maps in the game compared to the first game, but we’re planning to have almost double by the time the game ships. UFOs now have interior variants rather than being the same layout every time. There’s a game system that intelligently selects maps rather than just picking them randomly, which means maps should repeat less often. It tracks what maps the player has seen and will show valid maps that have not been seen yet before repeating ones that have been seen (this will become more effective as we add more maps). It will also try to select biomes that have not been seen recently when generating random missions (although this doesn’t help with UFO Crash Sites, as these choose the biome based on where you shoot down the UFO). The large 3x3 vehicles from the first game are replaced by smaller and more modular 1x1 vehicles. This might initially sound like a downgrade, but in practice they are way cooler: They only replace one soldier, and can bring more than one once you get the advanced dropships. Being smaller, these are much more useful inside buildings or in tight spaces. Their ability to drive through walls opens up a lot of new tactical possibilities. Their equipment is much more modular, with several primary / secondary weapons to choose from. By default they have lots of TU, but you can fit additional Armour that makes them tougher but slower. If destroyed in combat, you can recover their wreckage (assuming you win the mission) and rebuild them at half cost. There’s also cheap Sentry Gun vehicles that you can build which can only be used in base defence missions. The player has access to more useful information in combat: It’s now possible to preview the hit chance of a shot from a movement destination before you commit to moving there (hold Ctrl+Shift with a move path selected). There is a new UI element that explains how the % hit chance is being calculated for an attack. The Xenopedia is now accessible in tactical combat (from the Esc menu) if you want to check enemy stats or abilities. On the easier difficulty settings, aliens show their Health and Armour above their head like in XCOM. Various items and game mechanics work a bit differently to improve gameplay: Enemy armour plays more of a role in combat, with some enemies wearing heavier armour and others not. Some weapons are relatively ineffectual against armour, whereas others either penetrate it or destroy it entirely. The AI uses movement waypoints to move around the map before they come into contact with Xenonaut units. This means they are often encountered in more interesting positions (in X1 they would often just find a nice corner and camp in it). There’s now a Focus Mind action that allows soldiers to spend TU to regenerate Morale. The morale system is balanced so units now only tend to panic if things are going badly for them specifically, or the team as a whole. We’ve added a new type of grenade called the Demolition Charge, which only inflicts moderate damage against enemies but is excellent at destroying terrain and destroying enemy Armour. The C4 charge is now remotely detonated, allowing you to blow open walls / doors at the start of your turn and do ‘breach and clear’ tactics. Weapons can now have multiple burst fire modes of different lengths (e.g. the machine gun can now fire three-round bursts and ten-round bursts). Recoil now works differently, and is a cumulative accuracy penalty which gets worse with each shot in the burst (Strength still reduces this). Units now have “Body Size” modifiers, increasing the chance to hit against large aliens and making smaller aliens harder to hit. On Base Defence missions, most aliens will be split between Hangars and other entry points, but certain alien types of capable of “infiltration” spawning which allows them to enter through other rooms. There’s also a number of more minor quality of life features that improve the game: Line of sight / line of fire is now fully symmetrical, so there’s never any instances where enemies can see or shoot around a corner and you can’t shoot them back. Each weapon has its own overwatch toggle, so you choose whether you want it enabled or disabled on a per-weapon basis. Content & Research Tree: The art and design for most things in the game has been refreshed, including: All the research art in the game is new. All weapon art has been updated. The soldier portraits and body armour have all been updated. Most aliens have had a visual refresh or are entirely new. All UFOs have been visually redesigned. The advanced aircraft and dropships are new designs. There’s an entirely new soundtrack. etc The research tree has been expanded and contains more content: Soldiers now have access to “modules”, which they can carry in their inventory to gain bonuses. These can range from armour plates that boost armour and tactical computers that boost Accuracy to items that auto-heal the wearer or boost their psionic defences. There’s an additional tier of weapons, and each tier now has different properties rather than being purely numbers upgrades (e.g. Lasers can be upgraded to recharge ammo). There’s also expanded stun weapon options. There’s some new armour, including the Stalker Stealth Suit which provides active camouflage. Many of the automatic upgrades from Xenonauts 1 now require a one-off engineering project. The research tree has been designed so there’s more opportunities to make interesting choices. There’s a lot of early-game research, so the way you prioritise it opens up different ways to approach the game. Every research project does something (beyond unlocking further research) – either it unlocks new items to construct in the workshop or it will grant your organisation some kind of bonus. Research reports contain summarised gameplay information at the top for those that aren’t interested in reading, but the text is also longer and more detailed for the people that do like the worldbuilding. Idle scientists and engineers now produce money, as they help out around the base and reduce your maintenance costs. This means you’re not heavily penalised if you accidentally over-recruit and run out of thigs for them to do. Strategy: The UI for all the strategy screens has been reworked and updated visually. There’s a new training system for soldiers, which requires the Training Center base structure. All soldiers at the base passively gain attribute progress points on a daily basis when this structure is built - but the Training Rate increases as your organisation performs more alien autopsies and interrogations, so rookies will passively skill up much more quickly at the end of the game. Soldiers now have diminishing returns on attribute gains (so their base stat rolls are now more important), which also allows rookie soldiers to progress fairly quickly without breaking the game balance. The alien invasion on the Geoscape has had some upgrades to be more responsive to player action: A certain number of tactical missions like Terror Sites, Alien Bases and Abduction are no longer linked to UFO activity. This ensures that the aliens continue to pose a threat (and the player continues to get mission variety) even if the player has air dominance and shoots down all UFOs immediately after that spawn. However, those types of missions ARE still spawned by UFOs - so you will face fewer Terror Sites and Alien Bases if you do shoot down most UFOs. They just won’t be completely gone. UFOs now have variable speeds on the Geoscape, which they update every few hours. This means slower interceptor types can sometimes catch faster UFOs, but they’re not reliable at it (as in classic X-Com). Attacks on Xenonaut bases will become more frequent if you are shooting down lots of UFOs. Alien attacks are only targeted at bases that contain aircraft that have recently attacked UFOs! Alien fighters on Air Superiority missions now have squadsight, and will move to engage Xenonaut fighters detected approaching other nearby UFOs (how much of a problem this is usually depends on how far away they are). Alien bases now spawn UFOs that resupply them. If the resupply is successful, those bases will contain additional enemies for a couple of weeks. Aircraft squadrons on the Geoscape now reflect the number of planes in the squadron, and there’s unique icons for each aircraft type. Once you reach the late-game, the aliens will begin destroying cities with an orbital superweapon and steadily raising global Panic, which effectively puts a time limit on the game. Although many people will appreciate the tension this brings to the late game, we will also have options to reduce or disable this orbital bombardment so people who dislike the mechanics can play the way they want to. The Main Base screen has been updated with several new mechanics: There’s an adjacency system where certain types of base structure are more effective when placed next to other structures of the same type. There’s a power system and (upgradeable) Generator rooms that generate it. Medical facilities at the base now improve the survival chance of “killed” soldiers stationed at that base. This further improves as you unlock new tech and upgrade the building (plus there’s a bonus based on difficulty level). Storerooms now have capacity limits, so larger bases may require more than one. The central base building is now a 1x1 Access Lift, rather than a 2x2 Command Room. This gives you three more grid tiles to play with. Selling items on the Stores screen now causes the price of the item to fall, eventually dropping to about 40% of the starting value. The idea is that the player is encouraged to capture each type of UFO once or twice, but grinding the same type of crash site over and over has diminishing returns. Soldier management and equipping soldiers has had quite a few changes and usability improvements: The soldier equip screen is now shown whenever you launch the dropship (although Ctrl+click on the launch button skips this). There’s a button to auto-fill the dropship with your highest ranked available soldiers, rather than having to manually assign them all. It’s now possible to control the orientation soldiers when choosing their position in the dropship (just right-click on their icon to rotate them). The Funding Report screen shows your estimated income at end of month, and has a panel that shows a full breakdown of maintenance costs of your whole organisation. Air Combat: This part of the game will be getting substantial upgrades during Early Access, but there are already several important changes: If you resolve an air combat battle, the game now shows you the planned result and asks if you’d prefer to play the combat manually instead. The autoresolve actually plays out a simplified version of the air combat, which should give more accurate results compared to the abstracted system used in the first game. You can now choose the starting positions of your fighters in the air combat (this is limited to the frontal semicircle arc of the UFO). You can control the speed of time in the air combat. As well as pause and normal speed, you can also select half speed and double speed. UFOs have different behaviours; although most will turn to face your fighters, others will try to escape from them. UFOs can now have weapon turrets that rotate to track fighters. If a UFO has escort fighters, the formation of these craft is semi-randomised. The equipment of your aircraft is shown on the Launch Aircraft screen. Individual types of fighter can be upgraded with improved armour on the Engineering screen as the game progresses to keep them semi-relevant. UFOs now repair themselves on the Geoscape, which prevents players cheesing the combat by attacking them repeatedly from beyond their weapon range with long range missiles and then returning to base to re-arm (and repeating) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts