KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

[hellbent]

has a great potential

it was already a failed prototype since day 0, because its devs are drowning in autism and wouldn't know fun if it bit their asses. but it could all be due to complete lack of skill: as far as i know, to intercept an enemy fleet you still need to send two of yours so that the first one forces the target to a hardcoded stop and then the second one can actually attack an enemy which, in fact, just magically came to a complete full stop in space after traveling close to relativistic speed.

The air combat is still "a work in progress" in X2. You can only auto-resolve air battles. Though, I have discovered you can only ever win them if you send 2 units to their 1 unit. So, pretty much nothing has changed.

It's a shame that this game is perpetually stuck in limbo without taking advantage of its strengths - the tacticool isometric combat can actually be enjoyable at times and its art style has a retro kind of appeal. And there's always a chance that modders might be able to smooth out some of the rougher edges. But seeing as this game needs less, not MORE autism, modders might just make it worse.

 

[Jaedar]

tldr: Thank you for paying 40 bucks to playtest our game!

Learning about Early Access for the first time?

The air combat is still "a work in progress" in X2. You can only auto-resolve air battles.

This is fake news. You can play the air combat outside the tutorial. It's basically identical to X1, except I don't remember being able to choose starting position and facing for interceptors in X1.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

BTW air combat is something that deserves a special mention here as it appears to have gotten somewhat more difficult (in a good way). I am about two months in and the original fighters are now basicaly obsolete (medium sized UFOs will defeat them and small ones will outrun them). The addition of alien fighters is also cool (I remember them being a thing only in UFO: Aftermath, they absolutely shit all over your starting fighters), so there is at least some positive development here.

 

[Stavrophore]

Im going to wait when they polish this game more at least remove game breaking bugs. When i first started the campaign on the release version a week ago i had a team full of accelerated weapons, went on to that mission where you save civvies from tubes, and then bam i lost all my weapons. Since then i put this game on hold until they fix every major issue, and judging by the crap this game had at release, it will be long time until they remove all game breaking bugs that can potentially happen up until the end game, if they had such problem with a bug that happens literally in the second[?] month of the game.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

The air combat is still "a work in progress" in X2

we were talking about "terra invicta".

 

[hellbent]

Im going to wait when they polish this game more at least remove game breaking bugs. When i first started the campaign on the release version a week ago i had a team full of accelerated weapons, went on to that mission where you save civvies from tubes, and then bam i lost all my weapons. Since then i put this game on hold until they fix every major issue, and judging by the crap this game had at release, it will be long time until they remove all game breaking bugs that can potentially happen up until the end game, if they had such problem with a bug that happens literally in the second[?] month of the game.

Yeah, I just had my first base defense and it was running janky and buggy. My soldiers all had messed-up textures. I also had a sentry gun return from zero hitpoints and start attacking my soldiers with a melee attack after getting "killed" by a reaper. Pretty sure that vehicles / guns should be invulnerable to the reaper's "zombie" attack.

 

[hellbent]

This is fake news. You can play the air combat outside the tutorial. It's basically identical to X1, except I don't remember being able to choose starting position and facing for interceptors in X1.

Didn't work when I tried to manually resolve - controls would not work at all and there was a message about it being a work in progress. If you're getting different results, I'm guessing it was a bug on my end. I'll load up the 1.25 release update and do a new campaign and see if that fixes things.

 

[Jaedar]

This is fake news. You can play the air combat outside the tutorial. It's basically identical to X1, except I don't remember being able to choose starting position and facing for interceptors in X1.

Didn't work when I tried to manually resolve - controls would not work at all and there was a message about it being a work in progress. If you're getting different results, I'm guessing it was a bug on my end. I'll load up the 1.25 release update and do a new campaign and see if that fixes things.

I did also get a notification of WIP, but everything worked when I dismissed it. This was first day of EA, so maybe it broke since then. The tutorial also won't let you manually resolve.

 

[jungl]

game definitely has balance issues had a soldier shells all miss in a point blank shotgun blast. I'm sorry if you are going to sign up and call yourself a lieutenant in a top secret military organization you better be able to win the game of tag and touch the giant alien directly in front of you. Kindergarteners with mental disabilities are more competent wtf.

 

[Havoc]

game definitely has balance issues had a soldier shells all miss in a point blank shotgun blast. I'm sorry if you are going to sign up and call yourself a lieutenant in a top secret military organization you better be able to win the game of tag and touch the giant alien directly in front of you. Kindergarteners with mental disabilities are more competent wtf.

 

[Joggerino]

BTW air combat is something that deserves a special mention here as it appears to have gotten somewhat more difficult (in a good way). I am about two months in and the original fighters are now basicaly obsolete (medium sized UFOs will defeat them and small ones will outrun them). The addition of alien fighters is also cool (I remember them being a thing only in UFO: Aftermath, they absolutely shit all over your starting fighters), so there is at least some positive development here.

Weirdly, you still get some upgrades for the original fighters. I just used them as missile carriers (missiles get upgraded throughout the game)

 

[Stavrophore]

BTW air combat is something that deserves a special mention here as it appears to have gotten somewhat more difficult (in a good way). I am about two months in and the original fighters are now basicaly obsolete (medium sized UFOs will defeat them and small ones will outrun them). The addition of alien fighters is also cool (I remember them being a thing only in UFO: Aftermath, they absolutely shit all over your starting fighters), so there is at least some positive development here.

Weirdly, you still get some upgrades for the original fighters. I just used them as missile carriers (missiles get upgraded throughout the game)

Cannons too.

 

[Joggerino]

BTW air combat is something that deserves a special mention here as it appears to have gotten somewhat more difficult (in a good way). I am about two months in and the original fighters are now basicaly obsolete (medium sized UFOs will defeat them and small ones will outrun them). The addition of alien fighters is also cool (I remember them being a thing only in UFO: Aftermath, they absolutely shit all over your starting fighters), so there is at least some positive development here.

Weirdly, you still get some upgrades for the original fighters. I just used them as missile carriers (missiles get upgraded throughout the game)

Cannons too.

Yeah but your original fighters are too slow and weak to go into close range combat with the later alien ships.

 

[Jaedar]

Yeah but your original fighters are too slow and weak to go into close range combat with the later alien ships.

One thing I will say for X2 is that the ufo ai is quite good and not letting itself get flanked. Even approaching it from 2 opposite sides I could not manage to close to minigun range without taking hits (weakest ufo vs starting interceptors).

 

[Joggerino]

Yeah but your original fighters are too slow and weak to go into close range combat with the later alien ships.

One thing I will say for X2 is that the ufo ai is quite good and not letting itself get flanked. Even approaching it from 2 opposite sides I could not manage to close to minigun range without taking hits (weakest ufo vs starting interceptors).

Oh yeah, I used that tactic a lot in X1. Doesn't work in X2, as you said.

 

[geno]

Hello everyone - we've reached the end of July, so it's time for our monthly development update. It's been an exciting month, with Xenonauts 2 finally launching into Early Access on July 18th. The launch has been a huge success, with the game selling over 40,000 copies in the past two weeks, and the whole development team is really grateful to anyone who supported us by buying a copy!

Here's what we've been up to this month and what we have planned for the coming month!

Critical Bugs & Performance Fixes:
Almost all of this month has been spent fixing critical bugs like crashes or anything else that ruins the gameplay experience for players. We actually thought the game was pretty stable going into Early Access, but going from a pool of twenty to thirty regular testers to having tens of thousands of players exposed a LOT of issues we were previously unaware of.

The last couple of weeks have therefore been rather intense, as we've had to patch the game numerous times to address these issues. Thankfully the worst of this should now be behind us; we released 1.28b on Friday which improved performance and has fixed the bulk of the critical bugs. Work continued over the weekend and we've now fixed the memory leak players have been encountering and also (finally) managed to find and fix the annoying bug where terrain objects would sometimes get destroyed but not visually update (leading to units being able to shoot or move through what appeared to be a solid object).

Our immediate priority is to finish up the last couple of crashes we're aware of, and fix a couple more serious gameplay bugs - e.g. grenades missing when displaying 100% chance to hit. This should leave the foundations of the game in good enough shape to move on to other tasks.

Loading Times:
Once that is done, we'll be starting work on optimising the load times - hopefully this will happen towards the end of this week. There's not much more to say on this point beyond the fact that we're aware of the issue and we'll be working on it soon.

Milestone 2:
We're then planning to spend the remainder of the month working on Milestone 2. This will be the first major update for the game and it will involve changes to the campaign, which unfortunately means it will break save games (although you can continue to play your Milestone 1 campaign on the Legacy branches if you want).

As the programmers have a lot of bugs and usability improvements to be working on, I'm planning to focus on the air combat balance and the pacing issues in the existing campaign for Milestone 2. This is likely to extend the playable time beyond 180 days but it will not introduce additional UFO types to the game - it's more likely that we'll be expanding the role of the Cleaners at the start of the game instead.

The first Milestone 2 build will likely arrive on the Experimental branch in the next two or three weeks, where it will go through a number of iterations based on player feedback before being released onto the standard branches.

Expanding the Team:
Finally, the income from our Early Access launch means we can now expand the team to speed up development. The first positions we're looking to fill are that of a Level Designer and a Gameplay Programmer. If anyone is interested in applying, I've linked the job posts below:

• Level Design job post
• Gameplay Programmer job post

Overall, July was a great month for the project and we've really enjoyed seeing people playing the game we've been working on for so long. We look forward to delivering more upgrades in August!

Now they have enough money to delay the game for another five years

 

[Atlantico]

The weeks since release into Early Access have only been used for bugfixing and bugfixing is still the only thing on the horizon.

Beta testing sucks, but honestly apart from the lack of content after 180 days, the game is very playable. I've had one or two crashes since July 18, none in the last two weeks and everything that should work, does work.

The game is slow at loading, oh boy is it slow. The dev is talking about "optimizing" but we'll see. We'll see.

 

[geno]

The weeks since release into Early Access have only been used for bugfixing and bugfixing is still the only thing on the horizon.

Beta testing sucks, but honestly apart from the lack of content after 180 days, the game is very playable. I've had one or two crashes since July 18, none in the last two weeks and everything that should work, does work.

The game is slow at loading, oh boy is it slow. The dev is talking about "optimizing" but we'll see. We'll see.

That's how they work. They release a version with new features or changes and then they spend a month fixing bugs.

 

[Atlantico]

Well anyway, the 1.29 update is out. Fixes some memory leaks that happen during saving games, resulting in more consistent loading times.

Some gameplay and balance tweaks as well. I don't expect any more updates until the "milestone 2" is out next month, but that's ok the game plays without any issues as it is.

 

[PapaPetro]

The weeks since release into Early Access have only been used for bugfixing and bugfixing is still the only thing on the horizon.

Beta testing sucks, but honestly apart from the lack of content after 180 days, the game is very playable. I've had one or two crashes since July 18, none in the last two weeks and everything that should work, does work.

The game is slow at loading, oh boy is it slow. The dev is talking about "optimizing" but we'll see. We'll see.

The release must've got lost in the mix for me.
So how is the 2 holding up against 1?
(Finished X-Division mod way back when)

 

[Atlantico]

The weeks since release into Early Access have only been used for bugfixing and bugfixing is still the only thing on the horizon.

Beta testing sucks, but honestly apart from the lack of content after 180 days, the game is very playable. I've had one or two crashes since July 18, none in the last two weeks and everything that should work, does work.

The game is slow at loading, oh boy is it slow. The dev is talking about "optimizing" but we'll see. We'll see.

The release must've got lost in the mix for me.
So how is the 2 holding up against 1?
(Finished X-Division mod way back when)

One line review: It's X1 polished, now with 3D!

The 3D is very subtle, and is exclusively used to be able to turn the camera in tactical combat and zoom in on the strategic map. It looks like line art still. I like that.

On the whole it is an improvement over X1, at least what we have so far. So setting aside story and plot, which is very incomplete at the moment, the main strategic and tactical gameplay is IMO much better refined. Some new elements have been added, such as an enemy human faction and new types of tactical missions have been added, such as assassination missions and timed missions.

That being said, this is Early Access still, so this isn't a complete game. Half of it is missing. The plot ends on day 180 and there are no UFOs larger than medium at the moment. So right now, you can start a new game and play until midgame and then you can start again! Early Access sucks, but I only bought it to support development. More like a donation on my part.

I still enjoy playing the game in Early Access, what we have is good. It's incomplete and it is subject to change and so on, the game is stable and doesn't crash so if you want to try it, it's safe enough. Runs on any potato, the system requirements are basically: a toaster or a pocket watch.

 

[PapaPetro]

That being said, this is Early Access still, so this isn't a complete game. Half of it is missing. The plot ends on day 180 and there are no UFOs larger than medium at the moment. So right now, you can start a new game and play until midgame and then you can start again! Early Access sucks, but I only bought it to support development. More like a donation on my part.

This is the meat!
That's a huge bummer that they left it endgame anemic like that; it's the exact thing I wanted to see what they were going to do with the genre.
Like, it's a no-brainer how to do an XCOMlike up to midgame, but the variations come in the endgame with the existential escalation of the threat(s).

Smells like a tech demo for Æternal Early Access

...

 

[Atlantico]

That being said, this is Early Access still, so this isn't a complete game. Half of it is missing. The plot ends on day 180 and there are no UFOs larger than medium at the moment. So right now, you can start a new game and play until midgame and then you can start again! Early Access sucks, but I only bought it to support development. More like a donation on my part.

This is the meat!
That's a huge bummer that they left it endgame anemic like that; it's the exact thing I wanted to see what they were going to do with the genre.
Like, it's a no-brainer how to do an XCOMlike up to midgame, but the variations come in the endgame with the existential escalation of the threat(s).

Smells like a tech demo for Æternal Early Access

...

I think the devs are very wise to get the fundamentals correct before adding meat on the bones. X2 is 85% a tactical game, 14% strategic and 1% plot.

The tactics are now today at this moment very solid IMO — there's still some balancing to be done e.g. add more features like prone, more weapons, aliens etc, but honestly I wouldn't even bother playing the game now if the tactical part wasn't perfectly playable. Fortunately the tactical part is mature.

The strategic part certainly needs more development, air combat and base management could see more depth and I think that it will.

The endgame is TBD. It's what it is, and I'd expect at least another 6 months before this is released. Usually I never touch Early Access games and honestly I'd rather wait until this one is released, but I like playing tactical missions even if they are open ended so to speak.

It sounds like you should wait until the game is released.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/538030/view/3766758277171082668

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

Milestone 2
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).

Air Combat Rebalance
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.

AI Improvements
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!

Loading Times & Unity Upgrade
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.

Conclusion
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!

 

[Alienman]

The game is pretty fun now. It has been improved a lot. The best part is that early games have been expanded a lot with the Cleaners. And the new kind of missions, like VIP escort etc.