Xenonauts 2 October 2023 Update!

[Chris]

It's now the end of October and time for our regular Xenonauts 2 development update. Here's what the development team has been busy with this month!

Milestone 2:
Our main focus this month has been Milestone 2, which is undergoing testing on the Experimental branches. This is now feature complete - we're concentrating on bugfixes and balance changes while we wait for a few more maps / art assets / research texts to be completed. We're expecting to be able to release it onto the default Steam / GOG branches a couple of weeks from now, about halfway through November.

Milestone 2 contains a lot of updates, including several new types of tactical mission, a new UFO type, and some significant changes to the early part of the campaign to expand the role of the Cleaners (there's more details about this in our previous development update).

Air Combat Rebalance:
One thing worth mentioning in more detail is our rework of the air combat. We've implemented a more freeform equipment system for Xenonaut aircraft and then rebalanced the air combat itself so it rewards skillfully maneuvering your aircraft in a similar way to the original Xenonauts, while also trying to remove a few of the more abusable tactics (e.g. it's no longer possible to continually use evasive roll to circle-strafe around an enemy).

This means the overall balancing pass has touched almost every part of air combat. We've tried to create distinct identities for all the different types of weapons you can fit on your interceptors, make the different UFOs pose different challenges to the player, and added some new UFO weapons and aircraft equipment to increase variety.

Of course, many people prefer to simply autoresolve the air combat - and this is one of the ongoing balance issues we're aware of in Milestone 2. Making the game playable for people who only use autoresolve has led to the air combat being a little too easy for people who use only manual autoresolve, so we're going to be working to fix that over the next week or two.

AI Improvements:
We've also started upgrading the AI this month. We begun by focusing on the civilian AI, as they currently don't behave in a very realistic way - as MANY players have noticed! I'm not sure if we'll have a patch ready for Milestone 2, but if not then we should have noticeable improvements in place for Milestone 3.

Additionally, many of the issues we've found with the civilian AI were caused by problems with the general AI model - which means fixing them will make the aliens a bit smarter too!

Loading Times & Unity Upgrade:
Another thing we've been actively working on is improving loading times, with the eventual goal of reducing load times by roughly 50%. The good news is that we're making steady progress here, but the bad news is that players are unlikely to see any improvements until Milestone 3.

This month we experimented with stripping some further data out of our saved game format and found this sped up loading times by 25%-30% on our current (very outdated) version of Unity. However, when we tested this change in a more modern version of Unity, we found something interesting: load times were sped up by 25%-30% even if we disabled our change. It turns out recent versions of Unity have optimised that part of their loading process already.

As upgrading Unity will also bring a lot of other improvements to the game (e.g. better performance, proper support for borderless window mode, etc), we're planning to do that as part of our plans for Milestone 3. In the meantime, we're working on multithreading as a way to deliver the remaining ~25% loading time reduction.

Conclusion:
Although there's plenty of smaller things I could talk about, I'll end things here. I think we've had a productive month overall, and personally I've particularly enjoyed seeing progress towards fixing some of the largest remaining problems raised by players at launch (slow loading times, bad civilian AI, the air combat needing more work).

As always, thanks for reading - I'll write another post next month!

[odizzido]

Cool, sounds like good progress is being made 

 

And yeah it's hard to balance autoresolve I imagine. I am one of those people that ends up wanting to use autoresolve as once I've done a number of air battles it feels more tedious as they always go the same way and it's just a solved problem. If you make autoresolve too weak then you end up being forced to play parts of the game you don't enjoy....if you make it too strong then the game gets easier beyond your ability/gear.

 

I wish I had a good suggestion....maybe making it so that autoresolve follows the player skill or something. For example if someone completes two air combats against a certain encounter and takes let's say 20% damage then the autoresolve could complete those encounters with that result +/- 10% or something....that sounds like a lot of work to track though.

 

The other option is to display the odds of the autoresolve. So for example a player has an encounter which displays 100% success and 20-40% damage taken. Maybe another encounter has a 90% chance of success, 80-100% damage taken, and a 10% chance of failure. That way the player knows which battles to manually play which could reduce the tedium.

 

edit---------

There might need to be a second option for autoresolve too though, that being to be safe. For example if you launch two groups of planes at one target the first could launch long range missiles at the main target to weaken it then withdraw.

 

Maybe the autoresolve could have a couple options.

Option 1 would be 50% chance of success, 90-100% damage taken, 50% chance of failure.

Option 2 would be 0% chance of shooting down the UFOs, 50-60% damage done to the UFOs, 0-10% damage taken, and 100% chance of retreat.

 

These would depend on the weapons of course. Short range weapons could increase damage done but also reduce the chances of retreat or increase damage taken.

 

Anyways I haven't really played much of the game so I don't know how well any of this would work, but maybe the ideas were worth reading.

Edited November 2, 2023 by odizzido

[Alienkiller]

I haven´t tested Milestone 2 in deep so far. The Rework from Milestone 1 and for Milestone 2 are a very good step forward, esp. the begun important noticed Parts (AI, Airforce, Globe, upgrade the Game on the new Programming-Update, integrate the Cleaners better and much more).

We will see what the next Milestones will bring in to fill the remaining big / medium / small Gaps and missing Content / Features as well as Rework, Refit and Upgrades the existing Content / Features.

But from what I could see the Devs and Freelancers know what is meant from the Founders, Betatesters and Community-Gamers what they mean to improve the Game to get it to the same level as their direct competitors. 

In some Parts Xenonauts 2 overflow them already (like Vehicle-Upgrade, Soldier-Upgrades, Weapon-Upgrades and similar). But there is a lot more upward shift left for Xenonauts 2. The Devs have integrated an Part of it already in the Beta-Phases / Standard-Games.

Now they beginn to use the Unleash-Potential in the Milestone-Parts. They just have begunn and it will be interessting to see what comes back from the interessting Beta-Phases and complete new Contents / Features (like more Advancements and Refits for existing planes etc.), the Founders, Beta-Testers and Community-Gamers bring in as for this Games integrateable Suggestions, which don´t destroy the Game and the Concept of that Gerne, which bases on old X-COM, new XCOM, UFO ET and Phoenix Point.

Edited November 2, 2023 by Alienkiller