KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

[Alienman]

I had an easier time in Xenonauts personally. Think last time I played I lost about 20-30 guys, while in OpenXcom (with mods) over 100 agents were slaughtered.

 

[Harthwain]

You can't even use smoke and gas late game because it introduces enemies that are either immune or have such obscene resistances that it's no longer effective.

Can't you develop stronger grenades or something? Because introducing new enemies who mess up the established early- or mid-game tactics is not unusual.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

You can't even use smoke and gas late game because it introduces enemies that are either immune or have such obscene resistances that it's no longer effective.

Can't you develop stronger grenades or something? Because introducing new enemies who mess up the established early- or mid-game tactics is not unusual.

Nope, there is no upgrade for gas or smoke.
Which makes trying to breach larger UFO types and capturing enemies a lot harder, ridiculously so. Leaders and sebellians soldiers/warriors just won't go down to gas or electroshocks, and good luck trying to whack them with a stick when they can one shot your troops.
Sebellians are immune to smoke grenades anyway. Which wouldn't be too bad, if they didn't have a tendency to snipe from off the screen, even though they are supposed to have terrible eyesight and favor close quarters.

You do get stronger grenades, but I found the explosive grenades in xenonauts to be pretty rubbish; they consume a lot of TU, they don't explode immediately so you have to guess if it's enough to kill them, they have tiny blast radii, frag grenades don't seem to destroy cover and every soldier in xenonauts seem to have baby arms, even the ones with a high strength stat, meaning that you can't even throw them that far.

Now, I get the delay is so your soldier can GTFO if he fumbles his throw, but the thing is that it consumes so much TU that you probably won't be able to get out of the blast radius anyway.

There's asking you to change your tactics, and then there's completely invalidating all of your options until the only one left is to just go "fuck it, throw missiles at it until it dies".
That's what late game ufo breaching boils down to, because trying to capture or kill a late game sebellian crew camping on their command deck on veteran is suicidal. Can't suppress them because they're hiding, can't use smoke, can't use gas, can only nuke.
And if you don't nuke, you lose soldiers wearing expensive armor to a single shot.

I hope they add things like scanners, proximity mines and a more natural feeling progression arc.
The xcom had the first two and UFO Afterblank's / PP's hidden enemy mechanic was great and added proper stealth mechanics to the game, and xenonaut 1 had a slight problem where you suddenly go from soldiers having expensive armour that's useful to soldiers having expensive armour that's shit or weapons suddenly not dealing enough damage. It didn't feel like a natural progression of difficulty to me.

What happened to all the lasers you had from the first game? You seem to be using projectile weapons again? Did they do that lame reboot thing they did in XCOM 2?

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Do ceilings and roofs block LoS in X2? Because in X1 shots go straight through them as if there weren't there, resulting in some pretty weird and impossible shots. What's weird is that's something that just didn't happen in x-com; celings and roofs actually blocked shots and you could blow holes in them.

 

[MuffinBun]

Never encountered that. Do you mean like from the outside? Its common in this kind of games that the position on the roof means trading protection for sight range (say in CoH1 snipers in tall buildings have had scripted negative cover. In x games its more natural). X1 has some odd sight calculations, so when youre on the roof, even behind high sightblocker cover, you might find yourself caught by enemies from places you would not expect. Thats a problem of perspective and presentation.

If it happened indoors then I have no idea why. Maybe the tile was missing/destroyed earlier that turn.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Never encountered that. Do you mean like from the outside? Its common in this kind of games that the position on the roof means trading protection for sight range (say in CoH1 snipers in tall buildings have had scripted negative cover. In x games its more natural). X1 has some odd sight calculations, so when youre on the roof, even behind high sightblocker cover, you might find yourself caught by enemies from places you would not expect. Thats a problem of perspective and presentation.

If it happened indoors then I have no idea why. Maybe the tile was missing/destroyed earlier that turn.

Yeah, it was from the outside.
I'd understand it if there soldier was right on the edge facing the attacker, but it often happens when I have a soldier either on the middle or the far edge where no one should be able to see him. I can't even see who's attacking either.

 

[MuffinBun]

Unless it is some bug known to the community, Im pretty sure thats that issue of weird angles. The way the game presents the environment to you is not totally true to the model it uses for internal calculations; not everything matches the art assets and the chosen perspective screws you as well. So you're right to think the unit is well protected, but it actually isn't. Someone familiar with modding could comment on this. I know that in og xcom you could access the "3d map" the game uses for collision and sight calculations, dont know how they do it in this one.

May be the issue of range, if you dont see the shooter?

 

[udm]

Definitely encountered it before in X1 and yeah I'm sure it has something to do with Diner Dash LOS.

In fact all I want from X2 is true LOS. Is that too much to ask for

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah, Xenonauts is probably the only xcom-like I've played that has some serious issues with LoS, especially when it comes to the z axis. Firaxcom comes pretty close, but at least if you have a troop on the middle of the roof, he won't be shot by an enemy standing on the ground with magic homing bullets that pierce through several walls, ceiings and finally the roof.
Even x-com handled it better, and that was made in in the 90s ffs.

It doesn't help that the game ignores its own rules and has attacks hit with pin point accuracy through several pieces of cover. That might be a CE thing though.

 

[MuffinBun]

Firaxcom comes pretty close, but at least if you have a troop on the middle of the roof, he won't be shot by an enemy standing on the ground with magic homing bullets that pierce through several walls, ceiings and finally the roof.

On the other hand, in a standard engagement, everyone behind cover is fair game, despite the fact they're behind cover. This is so inferior to the old system of peaking out of cover, taking two or three shots, and backing off. Everything in that game (nucom) is so unintuitive, scripted, abstract; they should have just made a card game instead. Funnily enough, I hear the new firaxis game has a card component to it.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I agree with you on that point. Compared to other xcom-likes' tactical systems Firaxcom isn't that interesting. The cover system in Firaxcom doesn't even work that well either because of the pod system. The maps are so small and you have so few actions, that if you try to flank you end up aggroing a pod. This means that most players gravitate towards just using explosives to remove cover instead of risking a flank.

It's also why in the first game players developed that stupid overwatch crawl mechanic, which prompted Firaxis to introduce mission timers in XCOM 2, which make no sense because why the hell would the aliens destroy sensitive documents BEFORE they know xcom is there to seize them?

Firaxcom doesn't even have a proper projectile mechanic; you basically roll a die and a cutscene plays. Misses (or even hits sometimes) causes a random piece of terrain to explode.
It's actually closer to how UFO : Afterblank's and FO:T's combat mechanics work, albeit without the flashy cutscenes in those games.

 

[MuffinBun]

The cover system in Firaxcom doesn't even work that well either because of the pod system. The maps are so small and you have so few actions, that if you try to flank you end up aggroing a pod. This means that most players gravitate towards just using explosives to remove cover instead of risking a flank.

That doesnt even begin to describe it. Every design decision in nucom is straight up wrong. The pod system - that it dicourages flanking is only one of its problems. Heres another:

lets have a mission structure where the player faces 3-4 groups of enemies separately, in random order. But each one of those engagements must be challenging. So every pod should be able to take down a full squad, or at least inflict major losses. But then the player has to conserve the whole team at least till the very last engagement; if he takes casualties during engagement 2, he wont beat 3, since each is designed with full squad in mind.

That makes it so in xcom 2 you either win flawlessly, or dont win at all. This is especially apparent on harder difficulties. Compare to old xcom: you could technically have a massive engagement with most of the "pods" involved right in front of the landing zone. You could lose half of your troops, but as long as you down half of theirs, that's not an issue. So the game is cohesive, its intuitive; you're likely to lose some troops during the mission, and that makes those missions when you manage to save everyone more satisfying. In xcom2 its more akin to a superhero movie where everyone survives, maybe with exception of the guy who's contract is about to expire. Funnily enough, the new firaxis game is a superhero game.

Another thing: rolls. Rolls should leave nucoms entirely. They serve no purpose in this new system. New xcom-ite will tell you: "its about risk management. Its a part of the game". No. That's true of the original xcom. You start with 12 troops. Each of those can fire up to 3 times per turn. That gives you 36 rolls per turn. When you have 36 rolls, you can do risk mitigation. Since - if you really have an intention to hit, you will. In xcom2 you have 4 rolls per turn. They are likely to be something like 50% each. Quite common to miss them all. And as its been said, you can hardly take any losses. So that equals complete frustration. The point of the game is to grind for skills that are guaranteed hits, and equipment that does do, because obviously it is. All that to avoid interacting with a system that was core to the previous game, but here is utterly obsolete.

 

[jebsmoker]

i beat xenonauts for the first time yesterday and it left me longing for more, plus, i really liked the ending because it details what would actually happen once humanity defeated an alien force attempting to take over earth: political powers squabbling for the massive technological gains done by your military force; technology advances centuries within a span of a few months after reverse engineering captured alien tech.

even though your main scientist is a bit of an asshole, he understands that no political power can be trusted with the weapons he helped to create and would give any geopolitical power a massive advantage that they could use to beat others into submission

 

[Endemic]

I know that in og xcom you could access the "3d map" the game uses for collision and sight calculations, dont know how they do it in this one.

I'm not sure what you mean? There was an overhead map but it didn't show line of sight, just helped visualise vertical layers and visible units (shown as dots). Being shot at from an elevated position and not being able to see the alien (particularly on enemy phase) is a recurring theme in og X-COM. Line of sight in the manual wasn't explained at all.



Instead you have to go to third party resources like this: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Line_of_sight

Part of the problem is that reaction fire for the X-COM side doesn't get triggered very often, particularly at the beginning with low stats: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Reaction_Fire

 

[MuffinBun]

I know that in og xcom you could access the "3d map" the game uses for collision and sight calculations, dont know how they do it in this one.

I'm not sure what you mean? There was an overhead map but it didn't show line of sight, just helped visualise vertical layers and visible units (shown as dots). Being shot at from an elevated position and not being able to see the alien (particularly on enemy phase) is a recurring theme in og X-COM. Line of sight in the manual wasn't explained at all.

My wording may have been a bit misleading. I meant this(quoted from openxcom thread):

whoa, apologies, I haven’t followed this thread in awhile, but is this some new 3D engine for openxcom? Or an example you’re giving for clarity? Cool, either way.

X-Com engine (or rather its calculations) are actually 3D, the graphical representation is 2D. In OpenXcom, you can make a first-person 3D screenshot during a battle with F11.

If xenonauts was similar(idk if it is) you could probably use the 3d view(outside of the game) to look at the "problematic" parts of the map, rooftops especially, to see what the gameworld actually looks like and whether those results make sense.

 

[geno]

I know that in og xcom you could access the "3d map" the game uses for collision and sight calculations, dont know how they do it in this one.

I'm not sure what you mean? There was an overhead map but it didn't show line of sight, just helped visualise vertical layers and visible units (shown as dots). Being shot at from an elevated position and not being able to see the alien (particularly on enemy phase) is a recurring theme in og X-COM. Line of sight in the manual wasn't explained at all.

My wording may have been a bit misleading. I meant this(quoted from openxcom thread):

whoa, apologies, I haven’t followed this thread in awhile, but is this some new 3D engine for openxcom? Or an example you’re giving for clarity? Cool, either way.

X-Com engine (or rather its calculations) are actually 3D, the graphical representation is 2D. In OpenXcom, you can make a first-person 3D screenshot during a battle with F11.

If xenonauts was similar(idk if it is) you could probably use the 3d view(outside of the game) to look at the "problematic" parts of the map, rooftops especially, to see what the gameworld actually looks like and whether those results make sense.

Openxcom has a dedicated key to take a screenshot from the soldier's point of view. IIRC, the 3D stuff is just a voxel model running underground.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/538030/view/3376029156936765283

Xenonauts 2 - July Update
Greetings - July is now complete so it's time for this month's update.

Unfortunately, progress on the game this month has been somewhat disrupted by covid. All of the UK-based team members managed to get ill at one point or another, so - as you can probably imagine - this did not have a great effect on productivity.

While this meant we were not able to release Build V24 last month as planned, we are hard at work on it right now. There have been a lot of crashes to fix that have been introduced by all the new systems we've added since V23 but most of those should have been found and fixed. The team is now focussing on adding and polishing new content.

Breaking New Ground

Many of the terrain tiles we've been working on over the past six months have now been implemented and are starting to work their way into maps. This has been mentioned in previous updates but in V24 you should now see new (or revamped) buildings in various biomes such as the Jungle (which now has ancient ruins) and the Desert (which now has trailer park-style mobile homes). Farm maps now have a new type of barn and a storage shed, and the Xenonauts Base Defence missions feature a host of new tiles.

We're hoping to have the terrain tiles pretty much done in the next month or two, barring ongoing visual polish during Early Access. There's still a few base buildings that need tiles done for the base defence missions, and the Soviet Town biome is still incomplete - we're working on the buildings for it right now. Then it's just a case of checking through everything we have to ensure all the assets have the correct metadata set up etc. We've got a wide selection of tiles across a lot of different biomes now, so we should have everything we need to ensure the game has far more maps than Xenonauts 1.

Additional Art

We've also been adding other types of art to the game too - a few new autopsy paintings have been added to the Xenopedia, plus the Stealthsuit now has its final painted art. The UI update continues to progress with the Funding Report and the Xenopedia getting visual updates this month. We're currently working on the designs for the Base and the Base Stores strategy screen, and hopefully we can start to implement them later this month too.

Other Bits

There's not many new features that have been added this month because the coders have mostly been supporting other work. The map editor had become painfully slow due to all the data we've added to maps associated with the alien movement system (all the AI waypoints etc) so quite a bit of time was spent on improving performance there, and there was also work to be done related to the UI styling and functionality. Some of this is purely visual, but there's a few quality-of-life elements in there (eg the Xenopedia is now accessible in ground combat).

One thing we did add is the "tutorial notification" system, which you'll have encountered in other games -little pop-up notifications that appear at certain points in the game to explain information. For example, the first time you get a bleeding wound on a soldier it pops up a notification explaining how to heal them. Spotting a door pops up a notification telling you that you can right-click on the door to open it without walking through it, etc. The first batch of these will be V24 once Chris has had time to write out the text for them.

So that's been the progress over the past month. Not great but not exactly terrible either. Hopefully next update things will have gone more smoothly and we can talk more about our future plans in more detail!

Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord[discord.gg], the forums[www.goldhawkinteractive.com] or the Steam community if you have any questions.

 

[Mazisky]

There was a leak about a release date 22/03/2023, but it turned out it was the release date of a new barn asset for a couple of biomes.

 

[axx]

Ye olde covid excuse.
Those aliens know how to properly mow the lawn btw.

 

[80s Stallone]

By now one person could have finished this.

 

[Bigg Boss]

That COVID shit does not fly now. You can all work from home and it's just a cough with some minor vaginal tearing. FINISH THIS FUCKING GAME. That other Xcom style game turned to shit and if this one turns to shit I will be covered in shit and I don't like being covered in shit. I agree that those aliens really like to cut their lawns as well.

 

[Alienman]

That COVID shit does not fly now. You can all work from home and it's just a cough with some minor vaginal tearing. FINISH THIS FUCKING GAME. That other Xcom style game turned to shit and if this one turns to shit I will be covered in shit and I don't like being covered in shit. I agree that those aliens really like to cut their lawns as well.

Could always go for monkey pox.

 

[axx]

Could always go for monkey pox.

Yeah but doesn't that expose you as gay or sth.?

 

[Alienman]

Could always go for monkey pox.

Yeah but doesn't that expose you as gay or sth.?

Sure, but it's the game industry. They are very progressive.

 

[Grotesque]

Is the revamped air combat in?