Completed Campaign (7.15), Thoughts and Ideas

[Vin]

Hello! Never posted here before but longtime anonymous lurker and fan since Xenonauts 1. I recently completed a campaign of Xenonauts 2 on soldier difficulty and found I had alot to say when talking about it with a friend so I figured it would be worth sharing my thoughts here. 

First off, I think the game is a solid improvement over the first in pretty much every way. The campaign has much better pacing with the distinct phases of the invasion and it overall just feels tightened up. I had my doubts about the UFOs costing OPs after the first two, but honestly it worked better than I expected and contributed to that tighter game pace. There are lots of smaller areas which are improved but the better pace really feels like a big win to me. Only time it drops off is post UOO assault since you can drag your feet about doing the last mission but that issue seems endemic to the genre IME. 

The other thing I really liked is the tools which were added to help players come back from losses. Training, the NA region bonus, lasers being rookie friendly, modules, all good stuff. There were several times I lost multiple troops and, while it was always a setback, it never felt run ending because I had good troops waiting in the wings pretty much all the time. This has always seemed like a hard balance to strike so hats off on nailing it. 

All that said there are a couple small details I was surprised to not see. Mostly around colossus interactions. I was surprised that they didn't get their own heavy walking sounds, I know androns do and the colossus seems just as big/heavy as them so it felt off. That and I was surprised there wasn't a splat/crunch sound when stepping on biters, plus there were a couple times it was awkward to force them to step on the biters. Just little things ya know.

I do also hope to see more custom difficulty options post-release. The new extended mode toggle implies that'll probably happen so I just wanted to add that I think that will be great to see, and personally I hope to see a project cost multiplier option so that I can recreate the feel of XCOM:EU's marathon mode. 

I do have some other thoughts but with 1.0 right around the corner it's a little late to be making content or balance suggestions, so I guess everything past this point is food for thought more than anything.

The HEVY. I didn't use it, and skimming the forums that seems a common sentiment. Too much weight and TUs for something most soldiers can replicate with one inventory slot. I think the HEVY being a smaller single-tube secondary weapon that can launch any grenade would've worked better as it would be more versatile and not use up the precious primary slot. It would basically exist as a grenade range booster but that would at least be a good niche. But new models and animations seem like too big an ask so I get why something like that probably won't happen. Instead, I think the better solution is to make it colossus accessible. Since they can't throw their own grenades this gives them an option to do that, plus with their TU reduction on firing weapons I think they would just be able to fire three grenades with the HEVY, which I do think would be pretty good. 

Speaking of the colossus, I love it dearly as I did the predator before it, but I really do wish it had at least one more ranged weapon type to use. I get not giving them access to other infantry weapons, but aside from maybe the HEVY I would have loved to have seen them get a weapon or two specifically for them. Not sure what, maybe some kind of heavy rifle for anti-armour purposes? Something like precision laser stats but minus the penetration and reduced range in exchange for more generous TU costs to shoot it? Just spit balling, but would love to see something, especially since we didn't get a singularity cannon equivalent. 

Another thing that comes to mind is weapon identity. I was really happy to see it in this game whereas in the last everything was a linear upgrade. I really do like that lasers carved their own niche with the accuracy/recoil bonuses and recharging batteries. Between that and fusion weapons being the top tier though I found I did not use the gauss weapons all that much. The greater penetration is nice but fusion really does feel like a direct upgrade with its higher damage and improved shred. So I would like to see gauss weapons get something to help distinguish them, maybe a range bonus? 1-2 tiles for shotgun/pistol and 4-6 for the other weapons, could say something about how bullets don't lose cohesion the way energy weapons do to explain it away.

Last thing that comes to mind is SMGs. When people make suggestions about them in games like this they often seem to me like they seriously overlap with shotguns. And indeed while it was cool getting access to the cleaner SMGs I never used them as they didn't really seem to fill a role. However, I think they could. Something like, make them take a secondary slot, only fire short bursts with a ~45% TU cost. Give them 8 tiles of range and give regular pistols +2 range. This would give them different range brackets and they would also favour different movement patterns so I think they would be different enough that one would not always be preferable to the other. From a standstill the SMG would get you 6 shots to the pistol's 5 but the recoil penalty means that it's not a guaranteed better result outside point blank range.

All that said, I had a really good time with the game, so thank you all for your hard work!