Chris

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate you taking the time to write it out!

Ugh. Thanks, we'll take a look.

This update contains the next round of stability fixes for Milestone 6. We're now largely focused on our upcoming Milestone 7 update, but we'll continue to investigate and patch any serious issues reported by the community! As always, these hotfixes can sometimes break tactical mission saves. If you experience unexpected crashes playing an existing tactical save immediately after the update please try restarting the mission by loading the pre-mission strategy save. Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where the game would sometimes not show the Game Over screen if too many regions were above 100 Panic at the point where the player lost the campaign. Fixed a crash that could randomly occur during the AI turn during tactical combat due to an error in the AI's tile search algorithm. Fixed a crash that could occur if you shot down a UFO over international waters (i.e. in the distant parts of the oceans). Fixed a crash that could occur on the dropship soldier arrangement screen if the player hovered over a soldier icon in the dropship while dragging a soldier line in the soldier list on the left. Fixed a crash that would be (eventually) caused by players going to the dropship soldier arrangement screen from the unassigned soldier tab of the pre-mission soldier equip screen. Fixed a variety of crashes on the Soldier Equip screen related to assigning / unassigning the placeholder dropship soldiers on the Rescue Soldiers mission, and ensured they don't get stuck in the "Airborne" state if you cancel the dropship flight while it is en-route to the mission site. Fixed an issue with the target soldier generation on the Rescue Soldiers mission.

Yeah, so if you press F11 it creates a zip that contains all the recent saves and logs etc which you can attach to the bug post, which would make it a lot easier for us to understand what might be going wrong here, It seems to be a strange bug because if I kill the alien and move a soldier to their location, the shot is 100% blocked in both directions. So it'd be really interesting to have the logs on the shot because that might explain how this could have happened - looking at the save file it shouldn't be possible.

The best place for these posts is the balance threads, as others have said. But I think the critical issue here is that you're assuming the AI factors shield angles into its attack calculation, whereas I'm almost positive that it does not. Just like it doesn't avoid shooting at soldiers with heavy armour because it can cause more damage to soldiers with light armour. It can and does calculate where it needs to move to in order to shoot around the terrain cover objects you're hiding behind, but that's a different matter and one I don't think is actually an issue. The bigger problem in your quoted review is the fact the AI doesn't currently differentiate between Xenonauts it has seen and those it should have no knowledge of. If you want to discuss this further, please post about it in the balance thread.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Bugfixes: One additional bugfix for 6.30.0 before the weekend - fixed a crash that could occur if you shot down a UFO over international waters (i.e. in the distant parts of the oceans).

Sadly the lack of Epic release is down to Epic more than us, so you may have made a mistake buying it there rather than elsewhere. Unlike Steam or GOG, they don't provide developers with beta branches and for some reason they delete developer uploads after a week if they're not set live. We left 6.29.0 on the testing branch for two weeks over Christmas and so when we returned to the office after the holiday Epic had deleted it, which is why it hasn't come out on Epic. You should get the recent 6.30.0 update on Epic that also includes all these fixes when that is released onto the public branches (hopefully next week).

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where the game would sometimes not show the Game Over screen if too many regions were above 100 Panic at the point where the player lost the campaign. Fixed a crash that could randomly occur during the AI turn during tactical combat due to an error in the AI's tile search algorithm. Fixed a crash that could occur on the dropship soldier arrangement screen if the player hovered over a soldier icon in the dropship while dragging a soldier line in the soldier list on the left. Fixed a crash that would be (eventually) caused by players going to the dropship soldier arrangement screen from the unassigned soldier tab of the pre-mission soldier equip screen. Fixed a variety of crashes on the Soldier Equip screen related to assigning / unassigning the placeholder dropship soldiers on the Rescue Soldiers mission, and ensured they don't get stuck in the "Airborne" state if you cancel the dropship flight while it is en-route to the mission site. Fixed an issue with the target soldier generation on the Rescue Soldiers mission.

There isn't a way at present. Permitting demolishing the access lift is on our to-do list but unfortunately we've been busy with higher priority issues.

Thanks for the comments everyone. I've given it all a read and noted down several things to evaluate in the balance pass for Milestone 7.

There's already a functional Stress system in the game, but it's currently disabled (and I think if we turned it on again we'd probably find it needs a few updates to work properly again). It added more complexity and I wasn't sure if it benefitted gameplay enough to justify the overhead. It's certainly something I'd be willing to explore properly in an expansion - however, it's also not at the top of the list of things I want to improve. Barring any unforseen circumstances we'll be doing some free updates and DLC for Xenonauts 2 post-release, yeah. Hopefully some of the stuff you're interested in will eventually make an appearance

Yes, it probably makes sense to add some kind of weight limit on soldiers on the soldier equip screen.

You'll need to provide a save with some specific examples of missed shots being problems here. We're not going to ignore the ceiling from grenade hit paths, but with good examples of what is going wrong then we can hopefully improve the algorithm a bit more.

Hello everyone - hope you all had a good Christmas and new year! I just wanted to quickly ask anyone that has been enjoying Xenonauts 2 and hasn't written a Steam / GOG review of the game to consider doing so, as Xenonauts 2 will be leaving Early Access with the full release of our next major update (Milestone 7) and the review score can be an important factor in how many people are interested in playing the game at launch. Leaving a positive review really does help us out, so if you've enjoyed your time with the game and think the project deserves a positive review then we'd really appreciate you taking five minutes to do so!

Yeah, quite a few things changed during development. To cover a few of the things you mentioned: Locational injuries were kinda in the game for a bit, where being hit in different areas inflicted different amounts of damage. But in the end we felt the old 50%-150% damage randomisation was cleaner and worked better. The idea of having injuries seemed like a nice one but it was quite snowbally in practice; if a soldier gets badly hurt then it's not necessarily fun to have them also be unable to shoot / move properly too. I'm not ruling out exploring this idea more though, especially now you're managing fewer soldiers on the later missions and can pay more attention to each guy. Modular weapons were replaced by armour modules because we found there wasn't really enough design space to allow modification of the weapons. The existing weapon archetypes already cover a lot of bases, so for instance it'd be kinda pointless trying to increase the range and power of a rifle when you could just take a sniper rifle, etc. Plus it'd need a whole extra layer of UI which risked overcomplicating things. So we went with modules, which fitted in the existing inventory system better (although maybe in an expansion pack we'd replace modules with a more complex armour & inventory system). Reaper hives - yeah, maybe we'll add these in the future. People just don't seem that excited about them though, they always did quite badly when people were voting on potential Kickstarter stretch goals etc. Personally I think they could be a cool late-game mission to add a bit more variety.