Xenonauts 2 News

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

We're planning to release Milestone 2 onto the standard Steam branches for everyone next week. If all goes well this may be the final Experimental build for Milestone 2, so please give it a test and let us know if you encounter any issues! This update breaks save games so if you want to keep playing 2.10, please do so on the Experimental Legacy branch.

[h3]Gameplay Changes:[/h3]

• Convoy Ambush and Extract VIP tactical missions now support all potential biomes, rather than always using a fixed map. We've therefore added 12 new maps to the game to allow this.
  
• Added research text to the Mantid Interrogation and the Wraith Interrogation. This means all research projects now have research text (although I need to do a quick second pass on a handful more before I call this work totally done).
  
• The game now displays "Game Loss" as a failure effect on the initial ATLAS Base Reclaim mission.
  
• You can no longer access the VIP's inventory on the VIP rescue missions.
  
• Revised some of the objective text lines (that appear in the bottom left of the Geoscape) to reflect changes to the research tree.
  
• Aircraft screen now has tooltips for the Weight Capacity and Hardpoint Capacity.
  
• Beards should no longer disappear when you equip the heavy armour on soldiers.
  

[h3]Balance Changes:[/h3]

• Reapers now have 70TU (from 60) and 75 Reflexes (from 50).
  
• Sebillian Bravery increased to 70 (from 50).
  
• Wraith Strength reduced to 55 (from 60) and Bravery increased to 60 (from 50).
  

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed an issue where soldiers that have been removed from dropship (due to injury or being MIA on a mission) are added back in with a broken loadout (this could cause crashes in some circumstances).
  
• Fixed an issue where the game would fail to boot for people using the save game folder directory override.
  
• Fixed some Landed UFOs never taking off again.
  
• Fixed the Ammo Recharge upgrade for the Lasers leaving them with no ammo.
  
• Fixed an issue where a soldier caught in multiple simultaneous explosions (e.g. several vehicles chain-exploding) would sometimes only suffer damage from one of them.
  
• Fixed surviving soldiers being labelled as "Wounded" rather than "Survived", and not showing a recovery time.
  
• Fixed smoke tiles being visually duplicated (so looking much thicker) after loading a saved game.
  
• Fixed the sorted column header still being selected on the Soldier screen when you leave the screen and re-enter.
  
• Fixed the mods panel buttons all generating unnecessary popups.
  
• Updated the weight icon on the Aircraft loadout screen to be correct.
  
• Fixed some issues with the dockyard warehouse rollerdoor being able to get into a broken state once opened.
  
• Fixed the petrol station columns still being 100% blocking in their destroyed states.
  
• Fixed a typo on the Xenonaut base defence mission briefing.
  
• Time estimates for research / engineering projects that are not in progress should now always be consistent, as previously they could change by up to an hour (depending if you were closer to the start or end of the current hour).
  

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

Although we'll likely be releasing a few hotfixes this week and adding in the final pieces of art and research text, we're hoping this is the last major update for Milestone 2 before we release it onto the main Steam branches.

[h3]Research Tree Update:[/h3]

• Cleaner Agent Autopsy (new artwork)
  
• Cleaner Soldier Interrogation (text finalised)
  
• Cleaner Agent Interrogation (text finalised)
  
• Sebillian Interrogation (text finalised)
  
• Psyon Interrogation (text finalised)
  
• Reaper Interrogation (text first draft)
  

[h3]Balance / Gameplay Changes:[/h3]

• The UFO health balancing system that would occur based on the number of aircraft in your squadron has now been disabled, as it seems too easy to exploit. Let us know if that causes any major spikes in the air combat difficulty!
  
• If you have multiple soldiers selected on the Soldier screen, clicking either the Loadout dropdown or Role dropdown will attempt to assign the new value to all selected soldiers.
  
• Updated the aircraft weapon tooltips, and fixed most of those tooltips incorrectly displaying 0 for the weapon's Ammo Capacity.
  
• Cleaner Agent Interrogation now correctly unlocks when you capture a Cleaner Agent (previously it was unlocking off the Cleaner Soldiers).
  

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed a crash that could occur at the end of a tactical mission.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur after completing the Rescue Soldiers tactical mission.
  
• Fixed a crash that would occur on the Eliminate VIP missions due to the VIP not spawning correctly.
  
• Hopefully fixed the issue where grenades / medikits would show 0% hit chance and become unusable (this would occur after using the move-shoot preview mode).
  
• Fixed a bug where the new autoresolve weapon damage balancing was also being applied in manual air combat, which caused certain alien weapons to inflict enormously reduced damage on your interceptors.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Cyberdrone frontal shield was not correctly suffering Armour Destruction.
  
• Attempted another fix for shooting through adjacent crouched friendly soldiers sometimes hitting the crouched soldier (which it should not do).
  
• Fixed a bug where you could go overcapacity when hiring scientists / engineers if you had free space of the appropriate type at a different base.
  
• Added a bit more logging to try and catch the rare crash that sometimes occurs when exiting the Soldier Equip screen.
  

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

This build breaks save games, so you'll need to start a new campaign. If anyone wants to continue your current campaign, I've switched 2.08d to the Experimental Legacy branch and you can switch over if you want to keep playing that version.

[h3]Gameplay & Balance Changes:[/h3]
Strategy:

• Updates to the research tree:
  
  • Split out the Cleaner Interrogation research into seperate Cleaner Agent and Cleaner Soldier interrogation projects
    
  • Cleaner Agent Interrogation has new artwork / text
    
  • Cleaner Soldier Interrogation has new artwork / text
    
  • Xenobiology has updated artwork / text
    
  • General Interrogation has updated text
    
  • Probe UFO has updated text
    
  • Fighter UFO has updated artwork
    
  • Fusion Explosives has updated text
• Minor styling updates to the Aircraft screen on the new UI elements added in Milestone 2 (Weight / Hardpoints)
  
• Cash can now go negative on the strategy layer due to upkeep / wage costs
  
• Reduced weight of the Stun Gun battery to match that of pistol ammo
  
• Added unique artwork for all the different Gauss weapon ammo magazines
  
• Advanced LMG weapons now have 2x1 ammo magazines, like the basic LMG does
  
• Added the art for the HEVY Alenium Rounds
  
• Phantom equipment slots now placed along the bottom of the screen (to match the Angel)
  

Air Combat:

• The damage inflicted by UFO weapons in air combat (both manual and autoresolve) is now modified by the difficulty setting, ranging from 80% of normal on Recruit up to 120% of normal on Commander.
  
• When autoresolving air combat, certain weapons now inflict reduced damage against targets that can do an evasive roll manuever. For players this mostly affects Torpedoes, which have zero autoresolve strength against enemies that can roll. However most alien weapons that can be dodged using evasive roll also now do reduced damage in the autoresolve calculation.
  
• Updated the UFO Hunter Killer missiles to have a visually larger projectile
  

Tactical Combat:

• We've made some AI updates to make civilians less suicidal
  
• Secton Psionic Triangulation now triggers off nearby Psyons, not other nearby Sectons. This makes the first mission vs aliens less dangerous.
  
• Added some additional map variants for the Cleaner Data Raid mission, and also added some internal randomision to the building on those maps.
  
• Rescue Soldiers mission now draws from the entire pool of Raid maps, not one single Polar map.
  
• If you don't have enough space in the dropship to rescue the soldiers in Rescue Soldier missions, the game is now a bit smarter about who it recovers:
  
• Firstly, rescued soldiers can now fit into slots in the dropship vacated by KIA soldiers who failed their post-battle survival roll
  
• If there's still not enough space to bring back the rescued soldiers, the game will now always prefer living soldiers (so if you want to recover one soldier in particular, you can shoot the others).
  
• Fixed some tall props that incorrectly had 30% Stopping Chance, which should have been 50%
  
• Updated Abduction Tubes to be worth 2 Alloys (from 0), and updated the briefing accordingly.
  
• Camera Rotate buttons are no longer reversed, and now show the correct keyboard shortcut keybinds on the tooltip
  
• Fixed the click hitbox on the "Visible Enemy" head icons being too large.
  
• Pressing C when a unit is in motion will correctly queue up a crouch icon (as if you clicked the Crouch button)
  
• The orange TU reserve overlay is now shown on the soldier minitabs at the top of the screen when TU are being reserved by a soldier.
  
• Updated the human Pistol animations, making it more obvious that the unit is armed with a pistol
  

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed a Geoscape crash linked to upgrading items in the workshop
  
• Fixed jetpack 3d models not displaying in tactical combat
  
• Fixed the Exosuit heavy armour variant looking like Tactical Armour in combat
  
• Fixed The General displaying like a civilian in the first mission
  
• Fixed hair clipping through helmets for Unassigned soldiers
  
• Fixed some UFO walls on certain variants of the Destroyer / Observer / Abductor being indestructible
  
• Fixed aliens spawning within UFO walls on some of the new Dockyard crashsite maps
  
• Fixed some wall tiles being invisible in the Xenonaut base defence Medical Room
  
• Fixed the generators in the Xenonaut base defence Generator Room not allowing units to path through them once destroyed
  
• Fixed some missing shelf ends on the dockyard VIP Elimination missions
  
• Fixed you getting duplicate soldier hotkey numbers if you already had soldiers assigned to keys 7-9 when you go on the Soldier Rescue mission
  
• Fixed the human Combat Shield jetpack animations so the shield doesn't clip through the body at a 90-degree angle when in flight
  
• Fixed the combat shield clipping through the ground if dropped on the floor
  

Another very small hotfix for 2.08 to address a crash bug some players were encountering.

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed the game crashing on after a tactical mission if a soldier had suffered enough damage to be wounded, but was not killed.
  
• Fixed red debug error text flashing up every time a crouching soldier was given a move order.
  

It's time for our regular Xenonauts 2 development update. Here's what the development team has been busy with this month!

[h2]Milestone 2[/h2]
Our main focus this month has been Milestone 2, which is undergoing testing on the Experimental branches. This is now feature complete - we're concentrating on bugfixes and balance changes while we wait for a few more maps / art assets / research texts to be completed. We're expecting to be able to release it onto the default Steam branch a couple of weeks from now, about halfway through November.

Milestone 2 contains a lot of updates, including several new types of tactical mission, a new UFO type, and some significant changes to the early part of the campaign to expand the role of the Cleaners (there's more details about this in our previous development update).

[h2]Air Combat Rebalance[/h2]
One thing worth mentioning in more detail is our rework of the air combat. We've implemented a more freeform equipment system for Xenonaut aircraft and then rebalanced the air combat itself so it rewards skillfully maneuvering your aircraft in a similar way to the original Xenonauts, while also trying to remove a few of the more abusable tactics (e.g. it's no longer possible to continually use evasive roll to circle-strafe around an enemy).

This means the overall balancing pass has touched almost every part of air combat. We've tried to create distinct identities for all the different types of weapons you can fit on your interceptors, make the different UFOs pose different challenges to the player, and added some new UFO weapons and aircraft equipment to increase variety.

Of course, many people prefer to simply autoresolve the air combat - and this is one of the ongoing balance issues we're aware of in Milestone 2. Making the game playable for people who only use autoresolve has led to the air combat being a little too easy for people who use only manual autoresolve, so we're going to be working to fix that over the next week or two.

[h2]AI Improvements[/h2]
We've also started upgrading the AI this month. We begun by focusing on the civilian AI, as they currently don't behave in a very realistic way - as MANY players have noticed! I'm not sure if we'll have a patch ready for Milestone 2, but if not then we should have noticeable improvements in place for Milestone 3.

Additionally, many of the issues we've found with the civilian AI were caused by problems with the general AI model - which means fixing them will make the aliens a bit smarter too!

[h2]Loading Times & Unity Upgrade[/h2]
Another thing we've been actively working on is improving loading times, with the eventual goal of reducing load times by roughly 50%. The good news is that we're making steady progress here, but the bad news is that players are unlikely to see any improvements until Milestone 3.

This month we experimented with stripping some further data out of our saved game format and found this sped up loading times by 25%-30% on our current (very outdated) version of Unity. However, when we tested this change in a more modern version of Unity, we found something interesting: load times were sped up by 25%-30% even if we disabled our change. It turns out recent versions of Unity have optimised that part of their loading process already.

As upgrading Unity will also bring a lot of other improvements to the game (e.g. better performance, proper support for borderless window mode, etc), we're planning to do that as part of our plans for Milestone 3. In the meantime, we're working on multithreading as a way to deliver the remaining ~25% loading time reduction.

[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
Although there's plenty of smaller things I could talk about, I'll end things here. I think we've had a productive month overall, and personally I've particularly enjoyed seeing progress towards fixing some of the largest remaining problems raised by players at launch (slow loading times, bad civilian AI, the air combat needing more work).

As always, thanks for reading - I'll write another post next month!