Chris

@Nodrak thanks for the detailed reply. I don't have time to look through it now but I will on Monday. This topic may already be covered in that reply, but if not - after a bit of testing myself I decided I agree that the miss shot deviation wasn't large enough, so I amended it in the patch I released today on Experimental (6.24.0). It's now a little more than twice what it was previously, so it might be worth testing that to see if it affects any of your conclusions.

It's still there, isn't it?

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! This update contains our first round of balancing fixes for Milestone 6. I'm going to release them on this branch now so they get a few days of testing over the weekend while we wait to see if the wider playerbase encounter any stability bugs in Milestone 6. Gameplay Changes: Some weapon tweaks: Alien weapons (including the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle) now gain +2% hit chance per tile of proximity to the target, which matches the equivalent human weapons. Previously they only gained +1.5%. Fixed alien weapons having zero recoil, which meant burst fire from alien weapons was more effective than it should have been. The cheaper fire mode on Sniper Rifles now correctly has +20 No Move bonus, rather than +40 (which was higher than the more expensive fire mode). Laser Sniper Rifle now has the same fire mode accuracy / TU cost / No Move bonus values as other human sniper rifles (it got out of sync a few patches ago). The average missed shot in tactical combat now deviates from the target more than twice as much as before, but the maximum permissible deviation has been significantly reduced. This means missed shots will generally have a wider spread, but you should no longer see the occasional shot that flies off wildly at a crazy angle. The reason for this change is that previously miss shots would often deviate by such a small amount that many of them would still pass through the tile of the target unit - and while they were disallowed from actually hitting the target, they could still inflict suppression or take out the intervening cover, etc. Fighter UFO missiles have been reduced in speed by 25%, and the Interceptor UFO missiles have been reduced in speed by 15%, as both were harder to evade than intended. Bugfixes: Fixed a bug where AI units would sometimes ignore and not attack Xenonaut units that were clearly visible but did not start the turn directly within in their vision cone. Fixed some minor visual issues with the cliffs on a Polar Cruiser UFO crash site map.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad to hear you enjoyed both X1 and X2. Some of these are just there for balance reasons, even if they stretch credulity a bit - like the way assault rifles can't burst fire cheaply. In real life basically every modern soldier carries an assault rifle because they're pretty overpowered compared to other weapon types given they're accurate out to relatively long ranges and can fire a lot of rounds very quickly. It's not viable in real life to use a shotgun as a main weapon, or carry a ballistic shield and pistol on the battlefield. So to avoid basically every soldier in Xenonauts carrying an assault rifle (which would be pretty boring gameplay), we have to nerf them a bit and buff other weapons. The same is true for grenades; if you give them realistic levels of damage in a turn-based system then they end up more powerful than guns, so we have to tone them down a bit. I think point 1) is an interesting point. I've been thinking the same thing recently, and I may well tweak this in a future update. I also like your idea about having a separate set of Plasma weapons that appear not too long after Laser weapons, and contain some weapons that the Lasers lack (perhaps Shotgun + LMG, or Shotgun + Pistol). I'm not sure whether we have time to switch that up prior to release, but I think this sort of thing where certain weapons are not available in certain tiers might work best in an opt-in DLC / patch anyway - so I'll note it down in our ideas for post-release content. I agree with your suggestion about allowing soldiers to sidestep or move backwards without turning. The only difficulty is that we don't have animations for sidestepping or stepping backwards, and the animator who had the control rig stopped freelancing quite a long time ago. But I'll look into it if we have time prior to release. I can certainly see the value in the feature.

Milestone 6 is now available on all public branches of Xenonauts 2, and these are the consolidated patch notes for all versions that appeared on the Experimental branches up to 6.23.2. This update will break existing saves, so if you want to continue playing your existing Milestone 5 campaign then please switch over to the Legacy branch where the older version is still available (instructions on how to do so here). This is a significant update to the game that primarily focused on completing our Early Access content roadmap. Although there will be a little more content arriving in Milestone 7 (which will be our 1.0 launch build), we'll now largely be concentrating on polishing and improving what we already have. Assuming the finished game gets a decent reception on release, we're hoping continue expanding the game through a combination of free updates and DLC afterwards. We've created an official Game Balance / Performance Feedback thread to collect feedback on anything the playerbase feels is overpowered / underpowered, and to help us identify which areas of the game are most in need of performance improvements. Please leave any thoughts you have there! As always, I'd like to thank the many people who have played the game on the Experimental branches and given gameplay feedback or reported bugs. This hopefully means that this build is relatively stable - but if you encounter bugs, please do report them in our bug forums. We'll be watching them closely over the next week or two and will make game stability our priority! The updated interface for the air combat section of the game KEY CONTENT: Ending Cinematic: the ending sequence that occurs after the final mission is completed is now more polished, and includes the new campaign victory cinematic. Research Art: all research artwork and text for the Xenopedia has now been completed. Air Combat Revamp: the interface and artwork for air combat minigame has had a major visual refresh, and we've implemented an air combat section into the existing tutorial to explain the basic mechanics for new players. Some of the gameplay mechanics have also been tweaked; those changes are explained in full further down in this post. Soviet Town Biome: the Soviet Town biome is an alternate biome used for Terror maps. This has the same number of maps as the Western Town biome does, and it is a more industrial / residential environment (contrasting with the more commercial environments of the Western Town). Defender UFO: the Defender UFO is a new alien escort craft with a more defensive configuration than the Fighter UFO. It is tougher and less agile but equipped with a powerful medium-range "missile shield" weapon that is capable of shooting down incoming missiles, which adds more variety to encounters with escorted alien capital ships. New 3D Models / Animations: there's new or updated models for a number of alien units (particularly the late-game unit variants that were previously just palette swaps). Many of these also have new animations, or have had issues in their existing animations smoothed out. New Environment Art: aside from adding an entirely new biome, we've also improved the visuals in a number of other areas of the tactical missions. New "centerpiece" terrain objects have been added in various objective missions (e.g. ATLAS Base, the Cleaner Base, UOO-1) and a set of new "industrial" maps have been added for the Tropical biome. Major Balance Pass: we did a major balance pass on the game in Milestone 6 to address some of the feedback gathered from Milestone 5. More details on what we changed below! Translation Fixes: we spent a lot of time fixing up translation issues recently, so the localisation should be significantly improved. Please do report translation issues you encounter in these builds if you play in a non-English language! A preview of our new Soviet Town terror site tactical biome KEY BALANCE CHANGES: We've made some significant balance changes for Milestone 6, so I've added a bit of commentary here to explain our thought process! The biggest change is that dropships now carry 8/10/12 soldiers (rather than 9/12/16), and the number of enemies has been reduced accordingly. We think this makes the missions that do still support 16 soldiers (such as base defence missions and the final mission) feel more special, while improving the general balance and gameplay - the dropship upgrades were previously huge power spikes for the player (granting 33% more soldiers), while having to order around 12 or 16 soldiers on every single mission could become a bit slow and ponderous. A few aliens have been rebalanced to avoid feeling unfair, most obviously toning down the amount of suppression that Servitors can apply to large areas and changing Reaper Zombies so they now only spawn a new Reaper if they survive two full turns (rather than spawning a new Reaper on death even if killed immediately). These enemies should still be dangerous, but are much less likely to start a chain reaction that wipes out your entire squad. Updates were made to Phase 1 to make it more forgiving on the easier difficulty settings, as it could end quite abruptly if you weren't familiar with the strategic mechanics. Doomsday is now gained more slowly on lower difficulty settings, and in general we've increased the weighting of tactical combat rewards so that if you concentrate on doing well in the tactical missions then Doomsday should largely take care of itself (although you'll need to pay a bit more attention to your strategic approach on Veteran and Commander). Phase 2 has been made more intense, with larger waves of UFOs and tougher aliens - previously we found it a bit anticlimactic, with the narrative telling you that the alien invasion had just begun but the gameplay actually being less pressured and less difficult than Phase 1. We also felt the research tree had some pacing issues, with too much tech coming in Phase 1 & 2 and too little afterwards, so we pushed a few projects back a bit (Gauss Weapons and Plasma / Fusion Explosives being the most important of these). As there are now significantly more UFOs to shoot down, we've re-enabled the UFO Delegation system we were testing in Milestone 5. This works by "delegating" UFOs to the local regions once you have completed two crash sites of that type, resulting in a permanent +$200,000/month funding increase in exchange for handing over responsibility for capturing that UFO type (and the resources inside). The player must then pay an Operations Point charge for any further Crash Sites of that type that they complete, which adds a cost to the resources you would gain from winning that mission - making completing these extra Crash Sites a strategic choice rather than an obligation. This system can be disabled in the campaign options if people would prefer to play without it. However, bear in mind that doing so makes the game significantly grindier - doing two missions per UFO type seemed to be the sweet spot for most players where the game isn't too repetitive. Nonetheless, we encourage players to customise their experience to their own preferences. Strategy Layer: Dropships now carry 8/10/12 soldiers, not 9/12/16. Final mission and base defence missions still allow 16 soldiers. UFO Delegation system becomes active on completion of two Crash Sites / Land Sites for a particular type of UFO. At that point, further Crash Sites of that type are "delegated" to the local government. This has the following effects: Player gains +$200,000 per month funding. Player must pay an Operations Point cost to complete further Crash Sites for that type of UFO (the cost is higher for larger UFO types). Player still receives the cash bounty for not completing a Crash Site once that UFO type has been delegated. Battleship UFOs and the various UFOs that create Wreckage rather than Crash Sites (e.g. Probe, Fighter, etc) are not affected by this system. There is a campaign option to disable this system. However, this also disables the monthly funding increase that occurs when you delegate a UFO, giving a lower monthly income in exchange for the ability to run more crash site missions. Various changes have been made that affect the Doomsday Counter in Phase 1: Doomsday now starts at 30 (Recruit/Soldier), or 40 (Veteran/Commander). The starting number of Infiltrators now varies in number based on difficulty, and each Infiltrator generates +0.5 Doomsday per day rather than +1. Elite Supporters no longer cause double the Doomsday gain of normal Supporters when in the Infiltrator state. Changed various Phase 1 missions and their rewards: Winning a Cleaner mission now grants you -25 Doomsday, which in some cases was a significant increase. The secondary rewards have been better balanced to keep the missions of similar importance: Extract VIP missions now have the VIP carrying a briefcase item that contains investigative data on the Cleaners. Successfully extracting it grants +50 OP. Capturing The General alive on the ATLAS Base mission now only grants +100 Operations Points on research (down from +150). Cleaner Data items from Data Raid / Eliminate VIP missions are now worth +5 Operation Points each (not +10). Rescue Soldiers mission has returned. The soldiers to be rescued no longer carry a Briefcase of Money, but are now equipped with a Medikit secondary item alongside their rifles. Phase 1 Abduction missions now only generate +2 Doomsday for each civilian abducted by the aliens (reduced from +3). Cleaner Base has been pushed back into Phase 2, and replaced with an Abduction mission. It now causes +1 Panic in each region per week until it is completed, and the -30 Doomsday effect has been removed (as it is no longer in Phase 1 so is irrelevant). Cleaner Leader Elimination mission has been made slightly easier by giving the enemies weaker weapons. Removed the Cleaner Soldiers from the first Abduction Site (as it occurs shortly before the Rescue Soldiers mission where you fight a whole team of Cleaner Soldiers). Replaced the Sectons in the second Abduction Site with Mantids. Fixed a bug where most Scout UFOs and Destroyer UFOs were not reducing Doomsday when shot down. Geoscape Supporters have seen various changes: Supporters now take 5 days to replace if eliminated, and cannot be recruited until they have been replaced. Infiltrators now cause +2 Panic in their local region at month end. All types of recruited Supporter now grant -1 Panic in their local region at month end. Security Supporters grant an additional -1 Panic in ALL region at month end once recruited (the Elite supporter has double this bonus). Research & Engineering Changes: Autopsy and Observation research projects now require the appropriate captured / dead alien item to complete, and if the projects will disappear from the research list if you sell those items before completing the research. Autopsies will consume 1 corpse to complete, whereas the Observation is non-lethal and does not kill the captured unit. This means you cannot now unlock the Autopsy simply by completing the Observation given the alien remains alive. Alien autopsy research projects now autocomplete once Xenobiology has been researched. Gauss Weapons research is now unlocked from Advanced Alloys (Abductor). Fusion Weapons research is now unlocked from Ultradense Alloys (Harvester). Guardian: Protection engineering project now unlocks from Advanced Alloys (Abductor). Gauss Weapons now have a +damage upgrade engineering project that unlocks from Alien Fusion Weapons (roughly Cruisers onwards). Alien Psi-Amp has been removed from Psyon Officers / Leaders. The Mind Shield now unlocks either from a captured Psyon, or a dead / captured Eternal. Fusion Autorifle upgrade now needs Gauss Autorifle as a prerequisite. Fusion Grenade upgrade now needs Alenium Grenades as a prerequisite. Increased Alenium costs in the first half of the campaign: Lasers now cost slightly more Alenium to build. Guardian Armour Protection upgrade now costs 50 Alenium and 25 Alloys (previously 30 Alloys). Tactical Module upgrade now costs 20 Alenium in addition to its 20 Alloy cost. Base Structure Changes: Medical Center - reduced survival chance bonus to 20% (from 25%) Surgical Center - reduced survival chance bonus to 30% (from 35%) The Alloys / Alenium granted by individual UFOs has been slightly reduced. North America region bonus now grants newly recruited soldiers +5 in all attributes (reduced from +10). Reduced the maximum range of the Phantom and Gemini interceptors by 15-20%. Air Combat Layer: The new "paired slot" system means different aircraft have different slots available. While all aircraft have four weapon slots, equipping a cannon / lance requires using up an entire paired slot, and Angels now only have one of them! Angel: 1 paired weapon slot, 2 unpaired weapon slots, 1 equipment slot Phantom: 2 paired weapon slots, 1 equipment slot Gemini: 2 paired weapon slots, 2 equipment slots Fuel consumption has been turned off in the air combat. We found this wasn't a very interesting mechanic - it didn't usually matter, and when it did matter there was often nothing you could do to mitigate it. The retreat mechanics have been reverted to how they were in earlier versions of Xenonauts 2, meaning human aircraft must now reach the edge of the battlefield in order to retreat (pressing the retreat button causes them to fly towards the closest edge). However, this retreat area is relative to the position of the main UFO - which means you won't be able to escape if you have a faster UFO chasing your interceptor (and vice versa). The relative retreat zones mean that UFOs can never escape by reaching the edge of the map. Enemies therefore use a "Hyperdrive charge" mechanic to retreat from combat - after a certain amount of time, they will finish charging their hyperdrives and jump away, ending the combat and respawning some distance away on the Geoscape. Given the player no longer suffers fuel constraints, this adds some element of time pressure back into the air combat. It is now possible for weapons to be able to target missiles. The only weapon capable of this is currently on the Defender UFO, but we may introduce additional weapons with this capacity in future updates. Combatants now fly more realistic paths in the air combat, maintaining their intended speed unless they are behind a target and are firing at them (this will cause them to try and match speeds with their target). Previously units would behave strangely if moving to a destination behind them - rather than maintaining speed and banking to turn around, they would attempt to slow down to their minimum speed and rotate on the spot. The new behaviour should look more natural. Size of the deployment area has been reduced in scenarios where the UFOs are attacking you, preventing the player from deploying their fighters quite so close to the attacking UFOs. Fire arc of missiles in the aerial combat has been reduced from 180 degrees to 150 degrees. Combatant Changes: Geoscape and Air Combat speeds for UFOs and interceptors have been unified, meaning many of the larger UFOs are now significantly faster in the air combat than they were previously. Gemini interceptor now equipped with a short-range teleportation device, allowing it to perform short teleport jumps instead of evasive rolls. These move the interceptor instantaneously, and travel further and recharge faster than normal evasive rolls. Added a new combat maneuver for the Gemini interceptor: the wingover (which is effectively an instant 180-degree spin). The Evasive Roll now travels 25% further on the Phantom than the Angel. Scout / Fighter UFOs now have significantly increased turn acceleration (i.e. how quickly they reach their maximum turn speed), making them much more agile in a dogfight. Tactical Combat: General: Commander difficulty: enemies now have a 1.1x Accuracy modifier (down from 1.3x). Although Commander is supposed to be difficult, this bonus felt so high that you couldn't play the game "properly" because aliens had such high hit chances they could effectively ignore key game mechanics like cover / smoke etc. We'll think up a better way to increase difficulty instead. If a soldier has reduced Time Units due to being over their carrying capacity, dropping those items now immediately refunds those lost TU. When units suffer a morale break, they now have a 50% chance of Panicking and 25% chance of Fleeing or Berserking (previously 33% each). This change has been made because it's not particularly fun to have aliens Berserking too often. Soldiers now gain progress points in Bravery if they suffer a Mind Control attack, and gain additional points if the attack was successful. Mind Controlled Xenonauts that return to your control during your turn (i.e. because you killed the psionic alien responsible) now regain all of their TU. We've made a number of fixes and improvements to the AI (it's possible this has made the game a little more difficult). The AI now considers visibility of potential targets when throwing grenades, so units they cannot see will not be factored into their decision about whether to use a grenade and where to throw it. This should stop them lobbing grenades over walls at Xenonauts they've never actually seen. The AI will no longer mind control civilians. Alien Changes: Secton - the Psyon mind link now causes Sectons to be suppressed when a Psyon is killed, rather than forcing them to panic / flee / berserk. Servitors have been nerfed a bit: They can no longer reaction fire. Their weapon is reduced from 30 Suppression to 20 Suppression. Their weapon now has 20 range and gains +1.5% hit chance for each tile closer than 20 range. Previously, the weapon had 15 range but gained +12% hit chance for each tile closer than 6 tiles, which made them absolutely lethal at very short ranges (their overall range was made a bit longer to compensate for this nerf). Additionally, they will now do one big heal at the end of a burst of shots rather than healing after each individual hit. Reaper Zombies now only spawn new Reapers if they survive the incubation period, which has been reduced to two turns. Killing the Zombie within two turns of it being spawned therefore prevents a new Reaper from spawning (previously a Reaper would always be spawned on death). Biters, Zombies and Reapers should now spawn with 0% Time Units. This means if they are spawned during the player's turn (e.g. Biters spawned from overwatch fire), you don't have to worry about them attacking your units until the end of your turn. Reaper melee attack now has doubled chance of inflicting Bleeding Wounds, and Reaper Alpha melee damage increased to 80 (from 60). Most alien species now have scaling Bravery values - noncombatants have reduced bravery, basic soldiers remain the same, higher ranks now have somewhat higher bravery. Enemies should start becoming harder to suppress from roughly the point you encounter Observer UFOs. High Eternal - HP increased to 500 (up from 200HP), and Regeneration increased to +150HP per turn (up from +100HP). Sebillians - Regeneration now scales. Soldiers remain at +50HP per turn, but elites + officers now have +75HP, and praetorians + leaders get +100HP. Sebillians - Accuracy reduced by -5. Sebillians - early game Sebillians now have +5HP. Basic Cyberdrone now only fires 2 shots (down from 3), but damage increased to 50 per shot (from 35). Heavy Cyberdrone still fires 3 shots at 55 damage per shot (up from 45). Wraith Cloaking Field ability now triggers once at the end of a burst, meaning hitting a Wraith with two or more shotgun pellets / machinegun rounds / etc will only change the cloaking state once. Cleaner Sentry Guns are now able to move. AI melee units are now more aggressive. This should make Reapers more likely to aggressively close with Xenonaut soldiers, rather than just walking around. Improved the way that the AI handles burst fire weapons, which fixes various instances where Sebillians and enemy Sentry Guns would not fire their weapons despite having a relatively good shot available. Equipment changes: Sniper Rifles have been buffed and Rifles nerfed slightly, as there were situations where the rifle was mathematically a better pick for long-range sniping. The Sniper Rifle now has a longer range, is cheaper to fire, and the penalty for moving has been reduced a bit (but it can still only fire once per turn). Rifle accuracy slightly reduced (by about 5% on a 100% accuracy shot). Sniper Rifle range increased to 26 (from 20). Fire cost of both Sniper Rifle fire modes decreased to 52 / 64 TU (from 56 / 70 TU), Reduced the "no move" accuracy bonus on the sniper rifle by about half, and added a similar amount to the standard fire modes. Essentially this means the weapon is now more accurate if the soldier has moved, and the same as before if the soldier has not moved. Shotguns have been reduced in Accuracy by about 10%, as they were deadly at quite long ranges when used by high-Accuracy soldiers (this has a negligible effect if you're fighting at eight tiles or less, as shotguns get most of their Hit Chance from their high proximity bonus rather than their Accuracy). Xenonaut Shields now only offer 100% protection in the frontal 90-degree arc. Their protection linearly drops off from 100% down to a minimum of 20% as the angle approaches the edges of the frontal 180-degree arc. Guardian Armour now provides 18 / 36 Armour, reduced from 20 / 40. Colossus Armour now provides 50 / 80 Armour, increased from 40 / 70. Colossus Armour now makes the wearer immune to suppression. Colossus Armour now has a new secondary melee weapon available called the Power Fist, which has similar stats to the Energy Knife. Stealthsuit heavy armour variant now reduces Accuracy by -3 (previously 0). Upgraded vehicle armour now has scaling Hardness values in the same way infantry armour does. This should make vehicles much more resilient in the mid / late game. Laser weapons can no longer cause Bleeding Wounds. Gauss weapons now carry 20% less ammo in each magazine. Advanced Medikit upgrade project now also reduces Medikit weight to 20 (from 25). Automed Unit is still too much of an autopick item, so the weight has been increased to 12 (from 8) and the healing amount decreased to 3 HP per turn (from 5). It's intended to stop units dying from bleeding wounds, rather than replacing conventional healing items! Increased range on Electroshock Rifle to 16 (from 12), and increased ammo capacity to 8 (from 3). Mission Changes: Abduction - turn timer increased by +1 turn. Abduction - destroyed abduction tubes no longer count as "abducted", meaning it's now more beneficial to destroy an abduction tube you can't reach rather than let the aliens abduct the person inside. VIP Elimination - the VIP is now less aggressive, and should not push forward out of his spawn building once engaged in combat. Rescue Soldiers - reduced the number of enemy spawn points near the target soldiers on Rescue Soldiers missions, as it was too common for them to start surrounded by enemies and end up dead before you could reach them. Terror Site - these now have a consistent number of aliens bombs, so grant a consistent amount of Alenium as a reward. Crash Site / Landed UFOs - significantly increased the HP of UFO doors, but set them to start damaged if the UFO has been shot down. They should therefore visually match the damaged / undamaged state of the hull better, and be much tougher to breach if the UFO has landed. Alien Base - we've removed the destructible earth tiles between rooms in the Alien Base missions, as they were causing a lot of bugs and gameplay problems (they're still used whenever we have thick wall sections inside a larger room, but you can't tunnel your way between rooms any more). Alien Base - small alien bases now have one fewer unit in the upper level of the command room, and two or three extra (mostly weak) units in the lower level of the command room. Base Defence - blast doors on this mission can be manually opened like other types of door, and do not autoclose at end of turn. Blast Doors in the Xenonaut Base Defence / ATLAS Base / Cleaner Base missions are now much tougher. UOO Sabotage Mission - we've removed the optional objective to destroy the reactor, as this was hard to track and left a lot of people confused. UOO Sabotage Mission - enemy reinforcements now arrive 2 turns later. UOO Sabotage Mission - fewer of the enemies have Fusion weapons. UOO Bridge Assault - starting alien crew increased in number, but a larger percentage of them are now alien noncombatants with plasma weapons (rather than praetorian-rank aliens with fusion weapons). The noncombatants tend to be spread round the edges of the map, while the elite enemies are with the Eternal in the main room. UOO Bridge Assault - alien reinforcements take 1 turn longer to arrive, but they now include some elite aliens. UOO Bridge Assault - at the end of the mission, items are only recovered from tiles that contain Xenonauts (living or dead) or from the inventories of Xenonaut units. Previously the mission was incorrectly recovering all items from the map on victory. ENDGAME part 1 - alien reinforcements take 1 turn longer to arrive. ENDGAME part 1 - added four extra Praetorian-ranked aliens. There's also now dedicated spawn points for the enemy noncombatants, so they always spawn inside buildings rather than out on the planet's surface. USABILITY & CONTENT UDPATES: General Options: The ending cutscene has now been added to the game. The Air Combat section of the tutorial has now been added to the existing tutorial. Added four additional strategy layer and four more tactical mission music tracks from our composer Aleksi, doubling the number of tracks in each section of the game. The graphics settings for the game have been overhauled - we've removed a number of visual settings that previously made no difference to performance and set up some new graphic quality presets based on the things that do. We've also added brightness / contrast / gamma sliders. Based on community feedback, we've split the Ambient sound volume slider into two separate sliders for Ambient Sounds (background ambience like wind, bird calls, etc) and Environmental Sounds (sound emitted from objects in the game world, like fire tiles or vehicle engines, etc). Made the keybindings for the tactical combat "Soldier Rotate" and "Interact With" editable, as currently both are bound to RMB. Strategy Layer: Geoscape: Added new research artwork for Ultradense Alloys, Cleaner Device, Biosurvey Array, Singularity Core, Operation ENDGAME and Defender UFO research projects. Geoscape: When a plane reaches a waypoint, clicking Center on Aircraft now correctly sets time to the lowest speed. Geoscape: The mission debrief panel now lists "Enemies Killed" rather than "Aliens Killed" (as not all hostile units are aliens). Geoscape: Soldiers on the post-mission debrief screen are now ordered based on their position in the strike team (previously it was random). Geoscape: There's now a dedicated "Supporter" line in the Funding Report that shows the funding received by the Geoscape Supporters. Geoscape: Added an explanatory popup when the first UOO mission is unlocked, explaining you need to click the new button to launch the mission (as people often don't notice it). Launch Aircraft: This panel has been visually updated, and now shows a pop-up when you hover over an aircraft that displays the full weapon loadout and stats of the aircraft. Launch Aircraft: You can now right-click the images of aircraft in the squadron to quickly unassign them from the squadron. Launch Aircraft: Trying to add a plane to the squadron in a different location will now clear the existing squadron and add the plane, whereas previously it simply threw an error sound and ignored the command. Engineering / Xenopedia: Added a small orange "unread" circle next to categories / projects that the player has not seen before. Engineering: Corpses are now automatically marked as Junk items once you have completed the appropriate Corpse Analysis projects. Aircraft: the existing Hardpoint system (the blue numbers on weapons) has now been replaced by a "Paired Slot" system. Aircraft weapon slots are now either individual slots (which can hold one small weapon) or paired slots, which can hold either two small weapons or one large weapon. This is much easier to understand than the Hardpoint system and allows additional differentiation between interceptor types. Aircraft: You can now edit the loadout of aircraft that are still under construction. Aircraft: Items now play a sound when equipped. Aircraft: Tooltips for aircraft / UFO weapons now display the projectile speed. Air Combat: Added the final side-on art for the aircraft weapons in the air combat UI. Hovering the mouse over an aircraft information panel will now highlight the corresponding aircraft with a selection circle, making it much faster to identify which plane is which. Evasive Roll buttons and weapon tiles now show a progress bar, giving a visual indication of how long until that weapon is reloaded or evasive roll becomes available again. We've added a "throttle lock" button that allows you to override your interceptor's automatic speed adjustments. If this is enabled, setting a manual speed will lock that speed - it will not be changed if you set a new target, or if the aircraft gets behind a target and begins shooting at them. Aircraft speed in the UI now displays the current speed of the aircraft. Previously it was displaying the intended speed (which was already shown on the throttle). During the pre-interception deployment phase, aircraft speed now updates immediately if you adjust the throttle (in actual battle it takes time to accelerate / decelerate to the new speed). Fixed an issue where multiple missiles fired from a single aircraft / UFO at the same time would just visually stack on top of each other and look like a single missile. They now correctly offset and look like a volley of missiles instead. Tactical Combat: The Soviet Town biome has been enabled, which contains five small and three large Terror maps. Role icons for your soldiers are now shown under the minitabs at the top of the UI (there's a setting to disable them if you want). All building roofs should now fully support destruction. Move paths, worldspace UI elements, projectiles and obstruction shading are no longer hidden by the shroud. The information in the shot accuracy calculation element (in the bottom right of the UI) has been standardised, making it clearer which modifiers are additive and which are multiplicative. Psyons and the Eternal now play an animation when performing a psionic attack. Improved the camera tracking during the alien turn when aliens are shooting between different height levels. Autoclose doors now close before the start-of-turn unit vision is calculated, not after it. This means you should no longer get situations where the front door of a UFO closes at the start of the turn but the aliens inside are still visible in the fog of war. Explosion logic has been optimised to prevent the game briefly locking up while calculating grenade/rocket explosions. An icon is shown underneath the soldier minitab if that soldier is mind controlled, and you can no longer click that minitab to center the camera on that soldier. Various units now have updated 3d models: MARS / ARES Sebillians Cyberdrone / Heavy Cyberdrone Heavy Servitor Heavy Mentarch Cleaner Soldier (body armour variant) Mantids (only new textures) Sectons (only new textures) Lots of animation updates: Units with jetpacks or capable of hovering now use the appropriate floating animation when jumping or falling down levels. Units that don't have run animations (MARS, Servitor, Cyberdrone, Eternal, etc) now move at a much more consistent speed when moving. Removed a lot of unnecessary pauses during animations for hovering units, e.g. Mentarch, Servitor etc. We've made various updates to the two UOO missions: There's now some "teleporter" background art shown for these missions on the soldier equip screen (in place of the dropship). UOO Sabotage mission now has a proper 3D background asset, showing the lower levels of the space station hull. UOO Sabotage mission now has unique objectives text that refers to alien consoles etc, rather than using the same text as the Cleaner Data Raid. UOO Bridge Assault mission now plays a "teleport" effect around each Xenonaut soldier at the start and end of the mission. UOO Bridge Assault mission now has a fade-out sequence and sound effect to represent the successful destruction of UOO-1. We've improved the Operation Endgame ending sequence so the camera centres on the High Eternal, before fading to black and playing a cinematic (currently starting cinematic). You no longer have to load back into strategy mid-way through the process. Game now slightly delays the mission end if you knock the final enemy unconscious, giving us time to display the corresponding popup. Objects inside the UFO no longer reveal their position and stopping chance if you do a fire path through the UFO from outside the hull. Audio is now always played for visible objects when you move the camera over them. Previously it would only be played if there was a soldier within a certain radius, but this logic is now only applied to shrouded objects (preventing players hearing unseen objects from across the map). There's now a reveal region at the back of the Pegasus dropship so you don't need to check behind it at the start of every mission. Units no longer spawn blood pools on the ground when moving through tiles of poison gas. Fixed various shadow problems that existed in the Stable version of the game, where the shadows for UFOs and a handful of other props would be hard-edged shapes rather than a gentle gradient. The non-heavy versions of the Warden Armour and Guardian Armour no longer display a helmet in the tactical combat. Symbiote Rifle now has proper 2D inventory art and a 3D model. ARES now has an appropriate UI portrait "head" rather than an old MARS image. Added new Mentarch / Servitor / Cyberdrone movement sounds. Added sound effects for units crouching / uncrouching. Vehicles no longer show their vision cone during the deployment phase, as this was old functionality from back in the days when Sentry Guns could not move. Set various glass doors to smash like windows when shot through. Updated the Boreal sawmill to have some additional window variants Added new fire sounds for the ballistic SMG. Further improved the camera tracking for long-ranged shooting / shooting between levels. BUGFIXES: General: Fixed Operation Points incorrectly being referred to as "Command Points" in the new campaign settings. Any "stuck" sound effects should now be cleared when you transition between strategy / tactical combat, or the Main Menu screen. Fixed a crash that could occur during the character conversations if you press spacebar in the frame before it properly loads. Fixed several UI issues on 5:4 screens (and other rare aspect ratios). Fixed the game completion achievement not always correctly unlocking after you win the campaign. Strategy Layer: Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a manual save made immediately after an air combat battle. Fixed a hang that would occur if you pressed the Abort Launch button on the dropship screen while the "select soldiers" panel is active. Fixed weapon upgrade projects causing airborne aircraft to lose their ammo when their weapon was upgraded. Fixed the "Iceland Incident" Xenopedia project (the one with the EXDEF interview transcript) not correctly unlocking after you complete the Cleaner Device research. Base Defence missions now correctly allow you to use Wounded soldiers (below 50% health). Fixed a bug where the hitbox for any multi-UFO squadron would become misaligned after loading a save game. Fixed the soldier list resetting its sort order after recruiting soldiers. Fixed an issue where aircraft armour plating values were sometimes not calculating correctly. Nanofabrication research should now unlock when the dropship gets home after completing an Alien Base mission, not immediately after winning the mission. Fixed the Region Bonus popup sometimes showing the incorrect information string. Fixed some locations displaying the Geoscape clock using periods rather than semicolons. Fixed the Latin America Elite Scientist supporter displaying a green icon (rather than red) when an Infiltrator. Fixed a minor typo in the Demolition Grenade tooltip. Fixed shields displaying that they could be equipped in the "Container" slot, which confused players into thinking it could be placed in the Backpack. Fixed the Sentinel System module incorrectly reporting a vision arc twice what it should be on the tooltip. Fixed the Geoscape map scrolling having a visual "jump" when you scrolled far enough to wrap on the right edge of the screen. Fixed the engineering screen UI resizing itself when you add the MARS / ARES rebuild projects to the queue. Fixed the vehicle Heavy Reinforced Armour incorrectly being called the Heavy Ceramite Armour. Air Combat: Fixed the Observer UFO getting visually deformed after performing an Evasive Roll. Fixed air combat burst-fire weapons continuing to fire the remainder of the burst at interceptors even if they escape the fire arc of the weapon. Tactical Combat: Fixed a lot of visual issues in various maps and for various terrain objects. Fixed a number of AI hangs. Fixed a crash during the AI turn that could occur when carrying an unconscious soldier. Fixed various AI behaviours. Fixed another map that would get stuck at 90% loading. Fixed an issue where stunning the High Eternal would not successfully complete Operation Endgame. Fixed an issue where the camera would sometimes forcibly continue to track a moving soldier even if you'd tried to manually take control of the camera. Fixed a bug where destroyed shipping containers would still block grenade throws (even though the grenade showed a 100% chance to hit its intended target). Fixed grenades being unable to pass through destroyed building roofs. Fixed disabling "Allow Overwatch Friendly Fire" option not working correctly. Fixed the Extract VIP mission incorrectly ending early if your soldiers are inside the dropship but the VIP is not. Fixed the bug where UFOs would be revealed from the shroud without the player having any vision on them during night missions. Fixed units being able to perform reaction fire before they fell after having the floor below them destroyed. Fixed an issue where evacuating civilians would only move one tile at a time when on the edge of the map. Fixed an issue where only 11 "enemy visible" icons would be shown, even if more enemies were visible. Fixed damage numbers sometimes being visible in the shroud. Fixed Alien Base missions not revealing the map correctly if you controlled the command room, but an alien had entered the space underneath the control room. Fixed a number of issues with the obstruction shader (shown when a unit is behind an object) not correctly drawing over the shroud. Fixed dead aliens (killed during the crash) sometimes incorrectly spawning inside the walls of UFOs. Fixed an issue where live aliens could spawn inside the wall of a Battleship UFO on a certain map. Fixed an issue where Crushing units could walk through an open alien door and crush the doorway without also destroying the door. Fixed various issues with the movement path preview UI element, including some missing / incorrectly orientated tiles. Fixed the alien mainframe on the UOO Bridge Assault mission still displaying the interact cursor on hover once it has been interacted with. Fixed zombified civilians still showing the "evacuate" interact cursor on mouse hover. Abduction tubes that have been opened or have teleported away no longer appear as cover to the mouse cursor. Fixed a few shroud tiles around the Battleship UFO not being revealable. Fixed dead Reapers continuing to play their idle audio sound. Fixed blood splatters remaining hovering in the air if the floor tiles beneath them were destroyed. Fixed the game creating a broken save game on completion of the second part of ENDGAME. Fixed soldiers being invisible in the UOO Bridge Assault mission if you load the start of mission save. Fixed a bug where Mind Controlled soldiers would be recovered after a failed mission, even if outside the extraction zone. Fixed the Tactical Vest in the tactical inventory being renamed "Belt" the first time you change soldier. Fixed another example of the Alien Base command room upper level having incorrectly destructible walls. Fixed various buildings in Ambush missions that were missing deployment regions on the upper levels. Destruction particles should now correctly fall through the gaps between the space platforms on the UOO Sabotage maps. Fixed Wraith units flickering during their injury / death animation if they had their cloak active. Fixed a bug where units transformed into Reaper Zombies would spawn a corpse (despite the zombie being their corpse). Fixed the player not getting a "VIP spotted" toast if the VIP was spotted during the enemy turn. Fixed soldiers spawning off-center from their teleport pads on the UOO Bridge Assault mission. Fixed a couple of issues that could be caused by aborting stage 1 and stage 2 of ENDGAME. Fixed a Rescue Mission map where the soldiers were incorrectly split across two buildings. Fixed a bug where using the shoot+move preview on a cloaked Wraith would show the incorrect hit chance value (it would apply the cloaking value from the current soldier location). Fixed a particular type of hair incorrectly obstruction shading. Fixed a flicker on the Colossus fire animation. Fixed the default soldier arrangement for the Pegasus dropship spawning a couple of soldiers inside diagonal wall tiles. Fixed some of the walls in the UOO Sabotage mission not visually updating their appearance when destroyed, and still looking undamaged. Various fixes to missing / incorrect tiles in various maps.

Hello everyone - now Milestone 6 has been released onto the public branches, I've opened this thread so players can discuss their feelings about the game balance. Quite a lot has changed since Milestone 5, and you can see the full list in the Milestone 6 STABLE patch notes. It'd be great if we could limit this thread to balance chat, rather than using it to make suggestions about new content we could add. Milestone 7 will be focused on balance and polish so we're really interested to know what enemies / items / tactics you guys think are overpowered or underpowered. As always, please remember to let us know what difficulty level you're playing on when you post your thoughts! Game Performance: We're also planning to optimise the performance of Xenonauts 2 as part of Milestone 7, so we'd really like community feedback on which parts of the game feel sluggish, suffer framedrops or just take an annoyingly long time to load. We've attached a list below of places we think might need improvement, so let us know if you've noticed any of these being particularly bad - or if you have your own suggestions for places where performance is lacking! Strategy: Load Times into strategy layer Switching UI screens (e.g. moving from Geoscape to Research screen, etc) Geoscape - when UFOs spawn Geoscape - when time passing at high speed Tactical: Load times into tactical missions General framerate when looking around the map Duration of AI turn Explosions Thanks in advance to everyone that takes the time to share your feedback with us!

Right, OK. Well it's good to have a simple explanation of what you see as the issue. Thanks for that. The reason why shots deviate very little is because they're not set to deviate very much. The first standard deviation is a scatter of 3 degrees, which is a number that slowly been reduced during development. This means most shots won't miss the target by a great deal, and (as you've identified) this is independent from accuracy. If the shot rolls a hit, it hits the target. If it rolls a miss, it'll deviate and then travel down that path. It's not a bug per se, it's a number we've tweaked over time based on a lot of player feedback about how it makes the game look dumb if shots are flying way wide of the target - as I said, it's "realistic". Even a novice soldier can shoot within three or four meters of a target from a hundred meters. The tricky part is consistently hitting the bullseye. This is all just a number in our constants and it'd take 10 seconds to change it if we want. It might well be that this deviation value was a bit higher in Xeno 1, and that's causing the issues you're experiencing. I'm happy to consider changing it. However, part of the confusion here is that you're constructing a grand narrative saying this issue is way more influential than it actually is. We haven't programmed any specific systems or patches to stop this being exploited, because we had the "solution" for it back in Xeno 1 (25% stopping chance for units not being aimed at) and we implemented it before the game was ever released. It doesn't affect grenades, because they use a completely different hit chance / miss scatter system. It doesn't affect the AI (at least not directly), because the AI always directly targets what it's shooting at and doesn't consider what happens to the miss shots. The things you quoted from patch notes in earlier posts were done for other reasons. If you'd just created a short post saying "I think missed shots should deviate more" with a brief explanation of why then this discussion could have been much shorter. Anyway, here's my question - how are you actually making use of this knowledge to help with your gameplay? Assuming you're not doing the cheese tactic where you aim at the ground just in front of the target. It sounds like you're taking lots of low accuracy laser shots because you know they'll destroy the intervening cover? I can see that giving you an advantage, but not *that* big an advantage, is it? Is there something else I'm missing? Again, you're not explaining what you're seeing or expect to see here. You're just posting a bunch of screenshots. From what I can decipher, you're complaining about the Colossus guy with Laser LMG killing the unit slightly beyond range? Weapons do full damage up to their max range, and then with their current Long Range settings their damage etc falls off by 10% per tile after they exceed it. So a Laser LMG would do full damage out to 20 tiles and steadily reducing damage out to 30 tiles. This system is unrelated to Accuracy for obvious reasons. From what I can tell, you're barely shooting beyond 20 tiles with that Colossus, which means the system seems to be working fine. I'm happy to discuss these things but I'd appreciate it if you'd stop discovering "bugs" and immediately blaming the dev team for deliberately choosing to introduce them in an attempt to fix this hack. We're not actually idiots.

You still haven't explained to me clearly what the bug is - or if you have, I've not understood your explanation. What am I trying to recreate? Why is this not working as you would expect it to? What do you expect to happen instead? Please just write it out simply with no rhetorical questions and without too many screenshots. If you answer is already in another post then just copy-paste the relevant section with any extra useful commentary. I don't really have much more time to spend on this thread. I'll check in tomorrow morning and see if I can better understand what you think is the issue, but if not then I'll have to move on. Anyway, I appreciate the time and effort you've spent on these posts and we've managed to identify some weapon balance issues and an AI problem, so whatever happens it's been useful. Thanks.

I can't keep track of all the bugs you're raising. You've listed about 50 things you think are wrong with the game in this thread and while it probably makes sense to you, it's difficult for anyone else to understand what you're talking about at any given point. You might just have to repeat yourself to make yourself understood if you're posting this frequently. Is this particular bug you're referring to the issue that the unit with the red intervening cover number always dies first?

I realise now that crouching will break that "fix" I gave you, as any unit that crouches will get a stopping chance of 20% and when they uncrouch it'll become 25%. But other than that, those screenshots are playing out exactly how I'd expect the game to work. Any miss shots roll against every (non-target) unit it encounters and the hit distribution looks about right based on the stopping chances those units have (given the crouching unit has a 20% stopping chance).

Thanks for the AI save, we'll take a look at that. The AI has a weighting for self-preservation which is probably set too strongly relative to its attacking weighting, so it's probably trying to escape the vision cones of all your soldiers at the expense of doing an attack (and doesn't properly understand there's nowhere worth running to). That's why it attacks normally when your soldiers backs are turned. I don't think it's affected by reaction fire; it'll probably still run away if your soldiers are looking at it even if you empty all their TU beforehand so they can't reaction fire. Anyway, we should be able to adjust that to fix it now we've got an example of the issue.

OK. Well, you've got two options here - first, you could stop deliberately cheesing the game by not aiming at the target you actually want to hit. I've told you that it's a known exploit and the reason why we don't fix it is because the cure is worse than the disease for most players. If you don't want to do that, you can take the second option change the value yourself. Go to this file: \Xenonauts2\Assets\Assets\xenonauts\template\groundcombat\masters\actor\combatant\combatant.json Change this: {"$content":25.0,"$type":"Common.Components.StoppingChanceComponent"} to this: {"$content":5.0,"$type":"Common.Components.StoppingChanceComponent"} Now all units will have a stopping chance of 5% if they're not specifically being aimed at, and they'll get hit by far less miss shots. It sounds like that'll fix the majority of the issues you're having. For the Wraith not attacking you, please provide the save. It's not useful to just post screenshots of the AI not acting smart, we need a save to see why it acted like it did. Had it been suppressed on the previous turn, so it would only have had 50% TU?

So the bug we're talking about is the accuracy hack I mentioned in my initial post, where you deliberately choose not to aim at the target you want to hit? Is that the approach you're using everywhere in your post? Any miss shot will be disallowed from hitting the intended target. It'll then deviate a certain amount (often not too much at short ranges) and then travel down the deviated path and test each individual blocking object it encounters and roll against each other to see if it hits it until it hits something or strikes a floor / ceiling / edge of map. If you're choosing to use the accuracy hack, and there's only one intervening 25% blocking item between you and the target you're actually trying to hit (but choosing not to aim at), then the hit chance is 12.5% modified by the shot deviation. This uses a bell curve but you'll be at at least 10 tiles if you're taking a 0% shot, and the deviation has more of an effect as you get further away. At 20 tiles your actual hit chance is probably less than 5% as I suspect well over half the shots will deviate enough that they won't pass through the "target" tile. But I haven't run the numbers on that. However the fundamental point is that I'm not sure it's a good idea to balance the game around the assumption that most players will decide to cheese the game by attacking enemies by shooting at the ground in front or behind their target. If it was really that big a problem I'd just drop the 25% block chance for non-targeted units to 5% or so. But then that negatively affects normal players by making it less likely a stray shot hits another unit, which was always a fun thing to have happen in a battle. Re: grenades - as I said, there was a bug in the grenade logic that would cause the behaviour with the grenade you're talking about, and it should already be fixed in 23.2 which we released yesterday. If it's not then please report it as a bug in a separate thread, with a save where we can test it, and we'll fix it. It'll just get lost if we talk about it here. It's a completely different system to normal shooting and doesn't use accuracy at all, so let's not conflate them.

@Nodrak so I think there's a couple of things to discuss here. I think the first is you're giving the AI way too much credit and then working backwards from that to draw conclusions about the game mechanics. Why didn't that Wraith shoot the guy behind the box and kill him? I genuinely don't know, and I'd expect it to do that. If you can provide the save I'll ask the AI programmer to take a look. At present the AI will make the combination of attacks with the highest chance of hitting given the TU it has available, and the only explanation I can think of is perhaps the TU cost of rotating towards the box soldier would take it below the threshold needed to perform an extra attack (or a more expensive one) so it shot a target in front of it instead, even though that unit had a shield (which the AI doesn't consider). But it could also be a bug in the AI decision-making. It's nice to know the AI is good enough that people ascribe it intelligence but the rules are fairly simple in places. It has the advantage of being able to see the most TU efficient tiles to stand in while performing the most TU efficient attack combination to score hits, but beyond that it's not that advanced. It only uses grenades when your soldiers are grouped together, for example. It's purely random whether an alien decides to open the front door of a UFO and look whether you've got units stacked there. So don't read too much into what it's doing. If there was a bug where it became possible to shoot through building corners, the AI would immediately start using that against you, but for more complex stuff? It's just not that clever. The second issue is this "bug", which I'm still not understanding. Firstly, can you explain how you managed to fire at that soldier in the previous example if the game wouldn't let you take a 0% shot? Because it's quite important for me to understand what's going on. Then can you give me a more detailed explanation of what you mean by this? What do you actually mean when you say the actual hit chance is 12.5%? Where are you getting that 12.5% number from? Because if you're aiming at an enemy and the cursor displays 0% hit chance, you should have exactly 0% hit chance against them. If you've got a save where you can take a 0% shot at a target and actually hit them, please post it up. That would be a serious bug. I don't think it's really worth commenting on the rest until I fully understand what you're trying to say here. But to answer the question about armour destruction - yes, that should also fall off with range. The grenade problems are a separate unrelated issue, one that should be fixed in 6.23.2. But they use an entirely different hit calculation / projectile arc / miss scatter model to normal direct fire weapons so they're probably not very relevant to this discussion.

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! This build fixes some more bugs found by the community over the weekend, and found by our own testing. We'll probably do some further testing tomorrow to ensure these fixes haven't created any new bugs, and if we're happy with the stability we'll then launch it onto the public branches. Gameplay Changes: Slightly adjusted the crews loadouts of the Abduction sites at about day 190 and 250. These both previously used a mix of plasma and fusion weapons. The first site now uses entirely plasma (as it's too early for fusion weapons), and the second site now uses entirely fusion (as it's too late for plasma). Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur after losing a base defence mission. Fixed an issue where Servitors would be invisible until damaged. Fixed an issue where the Cyberdrone frontal shield 3d model would be missing, even if the shield was still intact. Fixed a bug where the UFO hull would not be hidden if the UFO door was opened during the alien turn, but would then immediately disappear as soon as you moved a soldier during your own turn. Fixed an issue where the game would sometimes show a 100% hit chance with a grenade but then that grenade path would always fail. Fixed healed HP being removed when transitioning from ENDGAME part 1 to part 2. Fixed a minor issue with part of the the Singularity Core model clipping through the floor. Improved the visuals for the damaged states of the various alien base wall screens.