V22 Experimental 10 Released! (including save games)

[Chris]

This is an experimental build - to access it, please read the instructions / warnings in this thread.

This build was going to be an early release candidate, but unfortunately there's several known bugs in it that mean I'm not prepared to label it a release candidate. However, it does contain an extensive rebalance. It WILL break save games, but I've included a bunch of saves from my own play-through so people can test the later stages of the game without having to play through it.

BUGFIXES:

• Soldier stats now randomise properly.
  
• Fix for multiple spawning "order arrived" popups when time is set to an high speed. Now they are summed up in a single one.
  
• Secondary explosion crash fixed.
  
• Some instances of incorrect night-time "alien detected" icon display fixed.
  
• Fixed Scimitar / Hyperion getting the wrong destruction graphics.
  
• Fix for terror missions not giving region relations damage when lost/aborted
  
• UFO icons now longer flicker on lowest time speed setting.
  
• Xenonauts can no longer pass their survival check after a mission if they have been gibbed or zombified (sadly).
  

BALANCE CHANGES: GEOSCAPE

• Reduced crash site airstrike values by half, increased nation funding by 30%
  
• UFO detected dialog is now shown again when a ufo re-enters radar range
  
• Selling condors no longer gives you money
  
• Heavy Fighter changes (from Max) have been implemented; Heavy Fighters are now slow to turn but very powerful when fought head-on. Corsairs eat them for lunch, if controlled manually.
  
• Tweaks to the starting base construction cost, nation funding levels and the time between terror / construction / base attack missions
  
• Made terror UFOs relatively much tougher, but spawn less frequently. Terror site penalties made much harsher for failure.
  
• Updated tileset masks to give a better mix of urban environments (farm / industrial) and emptier map types (the rest)
  
• Non-crash site UFOs don't give items when shot down over water, UFO datacore is now only listed once per UFO type
  
• Reverted Soldier Equip screen following soldiers when assigning them to a dropship
  
• Construction missions pushed back 50 points to ticker 250
  
• Increased Shrike and Valkyrie build times by 50%
  
• Air Superiority missions now have a shorter "cooldown" to target a new Xenonaut aircraft after a combat (1 hour, down from 6)
  
• Stripped some aliens from the Small Caesan / Sebillian bases
  
• Added a 50 ticker break after Corvettes but before Landing Ships (so overall escalation slowed by 50 ticker points)
  
• Removed the escorts from Ground Attack missions
  
• Valkyrie now requires either the Cruiser or Carrier datacore
  
• Updated rifle tooltips to reflect reduced range
  
• Removing range and hardpoints from UFOs in xenopedia
  

BALANCE CHANGES: GROUND COMBAT

• Sebillian / Andron Assault Plasma animations added
  
• Sebillian Leader Heavy Rifle sprites added
  
• All UFO doors set to auto-close at the end of each turn
  
• Removed the invisible blocking walls outside the Light Scout
  
• Alien weapons are reworked; alien races now have access to different weapons and the progression is more sensible. Expect a few less deaths early game and relatively more late game (Jackal has recieved quite a significant relative early-game boost as a result of the changes)
  
• Reapers no longer spawn from zombies with full TU, plus the spawn animation is much prettier now.
  
• Heavy Rifle is now a mid-late game weapon, the Assault Plasma replaces it in the early game for Sebillians / Androns
  
• Alien numbers in early terror sites / alien bases reduced a little
  
• Updated the morale system a bit so more panicking should occur
  
• All Caesans granted +5 Accuracy
  
• Nerfed Sebillian HP scaling, bravery scaling and overall suppression resistance (from 0.5x to 0.7x)
  
• Added 30 / 45 armour to Medium / Heavy Drones
  
• Added 20% more ammo to vehicle weapons, except for the Rockets
  
• Reduced alien Bravery scaling with rank, also increased weapon suppression with weapon tier
  
• Suppression radius on flashbangs reduced from 4 to 2.5
  
• Made Casean psions a bit more powerful psionically
  
• Zombie melee attack cost increased from 25% TU to 35% TU
  
• "Berserk" psionic power text now correctly refers to "Hallucinating" instead
  

As this update breaks saves, I've also attached a bunch of Veteran-difficulty saves to this post to allow people to skip forwards in the game and test the later game.

Corvette is a decent place to start playing, or you can try the early alien base mission if you want - that's with Jackal / laser weapons and can be relatively tough. Feels about right to me anyway.

Unfortunately the "Wraith" crash at Cruiser / Carrier UFOs up makes the late game a bit too unstable to enjoy right now, but the balance seems to be coming on relatively well anyway. I'll finish tweaking it all by the end of the week and then we'll hopefully be good to go for release.

Playthrough_MediumBa.sav

playthrough_cruiser.sav

play_landingship.sav

play_alienbase.sav

play_corvette.sav

Playthrough_MediumBa.sav

playthrough_cruiser.sav

play_landingship.sav

play_alienbase.sav

play_corvette.sav

[Chris]

If you're wondering what the remaining work on the game is, here's the list (not including the non-game stuff like the manual and Kickstarter rewards etc):

GEOSCAPE:

- The main menu background bug

- Allowing players to cancel Air Combat retreat orders

- Fix scrollbar on Barracks screen

- The extra Quantum Cryptology information on a UFO is lost when it is shot down and becomes a crash site

- The game crashes if you close it with a drop-down box open

- Adding more explantory pop-ups for various events: a pop-up for the first of each mission type, a notification when an alien officer / leader etc is present and needed for research, an explanatory pop-up when the map is revealed explaining surveillance etc

- If it's simple to do, I also want to add a pop-up allowing the player to arm their soldiers before sending the dropship out

GROUND COMBAT:

- Fix for the "Wraith" crash (could also be teleporters / psionics causing it)

- Fix for Valkyrie deployment crash

- Fix for Andron officers randomly disappearing

- Fix for night-time "alien spotted" icons still not working properly

- Fix for line-of-fire code when it says you can shoot through a door corner, but won't actually let you

- Force the line-of-fire code to show the "best" shooting path when you have a 0% hit chance against the target

- Harridans will actually seek higher ground and use their jetpacks (GJ)

Any crash bugs and game-breaking (the line of fire bugs potentially count as gamebreaking) bugs encountered will be added to this and we will continue to work on them once the deadline has passed.

Any other bugs are likely not to be addressed at this point, as we can only afford to spend so much time polishing the game up.

[aeons00]

A beautifully long change list! Looking forward to testing it

Edit: I am having troubles running the game in windowed mode...regardless of my selection for the windowed resolution, the game is run at my full resolution of 1366x768 by stretching the game vertically and giving it black side-bars

Edited May 27, 2014 by aeons00
Bug Identified

[kabill]

Looks like a really good set of changes to me.

Also:

Reapers no longer spawn from zombies with full TU, plus the spawn animation is much prettier now.

Yay! I thought about suggesting changing it, but figured you'd have more important things to do.

[vaultdweller]

Speaking of saved game compatibility: what are the post-release expectations there? Presumably the game will need patches after release. Is the invalidation of saves with each build a conscious decision for the experimental phase only, or are post-release patches expected to break save game compatibility as well?

[KevinHann]

This isn't something very important but would you consider adding a working mod management tool to the list to make the game more mod-friendly for the general player? Perhaps someone in the community would be willing to work on it if the team is preoccupied with the bug fixes?

[TacticalDragon]

Oh god, lot of changes! Good job!

Now more work for me

[Chris]

We're not planning to release further patches post-release, but if we do have to then obviously we'll very much not want to break save games when doing so.

There already is a mod loader in the game, but it's not really been used yet. I'll set up an example mod for the final game.

[Max_Caine]

Heavy Fighter changes (from Max) have been implemented; Heavy Fighters are now slow to turn but very powerful when fought head-on. Corsairs eat them for lunch, if controlled manually.

....

OoO

*faint*

[TacticalDragon]

A beautifully long change list! Looking forward to testing it

Edit: I am having troubles running the game in windowed mode...regardless of my selection for the windowed resolution, the game is run at my full resolution of 1366x768 by stretching the game vertically and giving it black side-bars

I can't run Windowed mode in none of our computers. I think that this option isnt working

It will be very usefull if mod tool works

Thank you Chris

Edited May 27, 2014 by TacticalDragon

[aeons00]

We're not planning to release further patches post-release, but if we do have to then obviously we'll very much not want to break save games when doing so.

While this is completely understandable, my worry is that the priority for meeting the release date might overpower the priority of balancing and testing...Do you guys already have a planned release date? If so, how flexible is it? I know a while back you said the end of may, but that'll pass fairly quickly here...

[Alexandre Lange]

Hey, Chris: any chance to polish animation a little bit, to make burst delay and sound match the animations, as I pointed here? You pointed the way, but I understand nothing about. I have tryed, I swear, I will keep trying, but it seems simple to you guys while it is a nighmare to me. Please modders (kabill, Skitso, Max, TD?), join me!

[Skitso]

Sounds pretty nice! Does this mean that AI will not be using higher ground (excluding harridan flying) or be susceptible to morale events in the final game? Also, if you want more maps, you haven't reviewed my middle east map pack.

Edited May 27, 2014 by Skitso

[silencer]

Reduced crash site airstrike values by half, increased nation funding by 30%

I don't know what that will achieve. Airstrike reward wasn't all that good in the first place. I know it is there for people who don't want to do 50 GC, but still performing GC yielded twice the money than airstrike + you get essentials like alloys and allenium. To be honest I only did 1 airstrike just because I couldn't reach the crashsite in time.

Heavy Fighter changes (from Max) have been implemented; Heavy Fighters are now slow to turn but very powerful when fought head-on. Corsairs eat them for lunch, if controlled manually.

Won't that be brutal for people who can't handle air combat pretty well? I've seen dozen of people who struggled even with the basic combination of fighters. Wouldn't it be better to improve the combat AI a bit, by not bee-lining towards 1 single craft?

Overall pretty neat update.

[Max_Caine]

I expect that Chris has made some changes, but in my original proposed design whether in autoresolve or manual control one-on-one a Corsair will always beat a Heavy Fighter, and a Condor will have a 50/50 chance. A skilled player with a Condor can do it in AC without taking a scratch, but you really feel the difference between the Corsair and the Condor far more than you do in any version up to ex10.

[kabill]

@Chris: I'm wondering, if folks got together to produce a patch post-release, would you be able to/willing to publish it as an official patch for the game? There's not a lot that we'd be able to do, obviously, as most of the key things will be in the source code. But there's little things - like the burst fire animations, little Xenopaedia inconsistencies, etc. - that are almost certainly not a priority but might be nice to have go out if they can.

I guess stuff like this could be released in an unofficial patch or something, but if it exists and it definitely doesn't cause any problems, it would seem sensible to me to roll it out generally.

[KevinHann]

@Chris: I'm wondering, if folks got together to produce a patch post-release, would you be able to/willing to publish it as an official patch for the game? There's not a lot that we'd be able to do, obviously, as most of the key things will be in the source code. But there's little things - like the burst fire animations, little Xenopaedia inconsistencies, etc. - that are almost certainly not a priority but might be nice to have go out if they can.

I guess stuff like this could be released in an unofficial patch or something, but if it exists and it definitely doesn't cause any problems, it would seem sensible to me to roll it out generally.

I fully second that, was going to ask the same thing exactly.

[va_ghost]

Is there any way to walk back a patch? I, honestly, like the description of the fixes overall but the utter crap morale is now makes playing the game tedious. Lose a single person and your soldiers start shooting each other. Unrealistic and breaks immersion. I have no idea how the heavy fighter fix works as I view it as a chore to get there instead of fun. Having the game make my people all run or shoot each other instead of it being a rare but tramatic event means I'm watching the game (and people dying) and not playing said game.

[vaultdweller]

We're not planning to release further patches post-release, but if we do have to then obviously we'll very much not want to break save games when doing so.

I don't think many developers plan to need post-release patches for their games, but rare is the game (or any other software package) that ships without bugs that later need to be addressed.

[dpelectric]

Reduced crash site airstrike values by half

Like Silencer, I don't get this one either. The capacity to reduce the grind factor via airstrikes is one of this game's greatest features, and I felt it was perfectly balanced before (~50% actually doing the GC)

Increased Shrike and Valkyrie build times by 50%

Hmmm, wow, weeks longer in our pathetic Chinooks

Stripped some aliens from the Small Caesan / Sebillian bases

I didn't feel they were overly difficult as they were?

Edited May 28, 2014 by dpelectric

[KevinHann]

But it's not reduced. It gets you additional funding in exchange and you get funding every month, multiplying the income in the process. Instead of getting a single cash injection. It's boosted overall.

[legit1337]

@chris

Are the tileset masks that are giving arctic missions in cuba and japan going to be fixed?

[dpelectric]

But it's not reduced. It gets you additional funding in exchange and you get funding every month, multiplying the income in the process. Instead of getting a single cash injection. It's boosted overall.

I'm not following you

•Reduced crash site airstrike values by half, increased nation funding by 30%

It was my understanding that you got at least an equivalent approval rating boost for completing a GC. Thereby either solution to a crash site (airstrike or GC) will net you the same 30% funding increase at the end of the month. If that's true, then the reduced airstrike value holds true

[TacticalDragon]

I dont know why, but in a clean install of vanilla (really clean one!) i have lot of issues with some maps, mostly game breaker, the maps gets crazy the AI. Any one have thi kind of issues?

[TacticalDragon]

I think that the issue is a particular map, one of the urban or industrial maps.

The other one is working great.

EDIT: Other player report the same issue

BUG REPORT

Edited May 28, 2014 by TacticalDragon