Chris

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.

This update contains the next round of stability fixes for Milestone 6. Please continue to report any issues that you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them! These hotfixes can sometimes break tactical mission saves, so 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 a crash that could occur if the save game process failed. Fixed a crash related to constructing base buildings that could occur in some rare circumstances. Fixed a crash that could occur on strategy when changing the dropship soldier arrangement on the aircraft screen. Fixed a crash that could occur if a blank "construction complete" notification appears. Fixed a crash that could occur if a Mind Control capable unit (usually an Eternal) went berserk. The game will no longer crash if you attempt to create a new campaign with the same name as an existing one when the game doesn't have the required file permission to delete the old files. Fixed doing a F9 quickload during the air combat messing up the UI. Added extra logging around a couple of crashes that occur on the soldier equip screen, and set the error not to crash in non-experimental builds. Display a pop-up toast if an autosave fails for any reason.

Thanks for taking the time to write all this out, it’s really helpful. Glad to hear you enjoyed it overall!

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 a crash that could occur if the save game process failed. Display a pop-up toast if an autosave fails for any reason. Goldhawk is closing for Christmas today, so I'm going to be leaving 6.29 on the Experimental branch over the festive period and we'll release it onto the standard branches when we're back at the office in January (I don't want to potentially introduce new crashes onto the public branch if we're not around to fix them). Merry Christmas everyone!

Yeah, that could work. It's probably not something we can implement in half an hour though. We'll see if we have time to get to it before release.

The problem with not dropping everything is that the items would essentially be lost if we didn't. They drop onto the ground so other soldiers are able to pick them up if they want (same logic as if the unit was killed) - e.g. players would be very annoyed if the soldier with the medikit in their backpack was stunned, and nobody could pick up the medikit to revive them. It might be that the TU cost of picking up items is too high though.

Hi - thanks. This should be fixed in the latest update!

Thanks. I just tested the tutorial on Commander and I started with $3m both with and without completing the tutorial. Maybe the change was based on the where you placed the base? It costs different amounts to place the base in different regions.

Thanks. It's always useful when players post up something this detailed, and I'm also glad to hear you enjoyed the campaign overall. I've read your feedback, and I've added a few notes below: Your difficulty curve feedback tracks with what I've heard from some other players too. The big spike in difficulty on day 240 comes because we're introducing alien Fusion weapons at the same time as a new rank of aliens that are tougher and more accurate than previous ranks (we'll be addressing this in Milestone 7). But it might also be that your natural level is Commander difficulty; I personally think the Cleaner missions in Phase 1 are about the right difficulty so if you're finding them too easy then it might be worth moving up. Can you explain further why you found the missions too easy in month 2 onwards? Was the problem that the aliens never had a chance to shoot at you at all because you could always kill them immediately? Or was it that you did take hits, but your upgraded armour was strong enough that it was easily mitigated? Could you describe your overall strategy in terms of what you prioritised on the strategic layer? Out of interest, did you run all the story missions as soon as they appeared (e.g. the orbital missions)? I think it's quite unusual to finish the UOO Sabotage mission that quickly. But I've not played it since the last balance pass. Thanks for the feedback on the alien abilities. Oh yeah, the alien base vents were cool. I'll create a note to see if we can add a few vents to the base maps if we have time. Depends how much time the level designer has free. You can still clear the command room in the alien base to get vision over the whole base. But yeah, having the AI make an effort to reclaim the command room would be interesting. I'll note that down as something to look into for Milestone 7. Yeah, the mission variety is a bit constrained by the structure of the game unfortunately - given that the aliens are massively outnumbered by the humans and fighting on hostile territory once the overt war starts in Phase 2, most of the mission types don't make logical sense any more. I do have some ideas for how to add more mission variety to the mid-game but that's probably DLC content at this point, because it's so time-consuming to add new missions. We've spent quite a lot of Early Access on that sort of thing already - the ATLAS Base, Cleaner Ambush, Extract VIP, Rescue Soldiers, UOO Sabotage, and UOO Bridge Assault missions were all new additions at various points during Early Access.

Well, I'm glad you enjoyed previous versions of the game at least. Thanks for writing a nice message. If you don't like the changes with UFO Delegation then there's already a campaign option to turn that off when you make a new game, so it's easy to go back to the old setup where you can run as many UFO crash sites as you like. There's nothing wrong with preferring to play with that system disabled. I'm surprised that you feel reducing the number of soldiers has that much of an effect on the game - it hasn't reduced the numbers of soldiers THAT much, especially in the first half of the campaign. But if that's a big thing for you then I can't really argue with that. Unfortunately there's no simple option to change this back, but once the mod tools are done I imagine someone will mod that (or maybe make a Long War style mod). Hopefully that would give you the best combination of all the things you want from the final version of the game.

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 a lot of crashes related to our increased error-detection in 6.27.0 Experimental being too strong. This should hopefully fix all the crashes in parts of the game that were working fine in the previous build. Fixed a genuine crash related to constructing base buildings that could occur in some rare circumstances.

Thanks. This is a weird one. If I load the save I experience that issue too, but if I start a new map then the walls for that dropship work as expected. Is it maybe the mission was started in an older patch? Let me know if you experience it in any further missions.

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 a crash that could occur on strategy when changing the dropship soldier arrangement on the aircraft screen. Fixed a crash that could occur if a blank "construction complete" notification appears. Fixed a crash that could occur if a Mind Control capable unit (usually an Eternal) going berserk. Added extra logging around a couple of crashes that occur on the soldier equip screen, and set the error not to crash in non-experimental builds. The game will no longer crash if you attempt to create a new campaign with the same name as an existing one, but the game doesn't have the required permission to delete the old files. Fixed doing a F9 quickload during the air combat messing up the UI.

No problem. To be fair, the tooltip that explains what that option does was missing until very recently!