KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

[Stavrophore]

>10GB memory usage when loading missions. Soldiers are cannon fodder and the game ramps up difficulty with tougher enemies after the first mission. Laser weapons seem to be crap. Also smoke doesn't seem to be affect enemy accuracy. Timer based missions are hardest.

Reptilian enemies can see through smoke. Laser weapons are poor against carapace and other ablative armors. Read the autopsies carefully next time.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Huh, armour types and resistances is a new mechanic, isn't it? I don't remember that mechanic being in X1.
10GB memory usage sounds terrible though.

 

[Stavrophore]

Huh, armour types and resistances is a new mechanic, isn't it? I don't remember that mechanic being in X1.
10GB memory usage sounds terrible though.

Its the same as in X1, as for memory idk.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I remember Androids being highly resistant to projectile weapons, but I don't remember other cases like that.
If they expanded on that mechanic then its a good thing.

 

[Zeriel]

Overall Strategic Summary:

• The aliens no longer have the capability to win an outright war with humanity - instead, they are secretly infiltrating our society and attempting to trigger nuclear war between NATO and the USSR.
• The world will be divided into 10 regions, as it is in Xenonauts. However they will all be assigned to either the NATO, USSR or Non-Aligned sphere of influence.
• There are DEFCON counters for NATO and the USSR. Alien activity in the respective territories will increase the appropriate DEFCON counter, and activity in non-aligned states is split between the two.
• Alien activity sparks Geoscape "events", which consist of a potentially dangerous event and several solutions for the player to choose from (each choice will spawn a different ground combat mission or have an associated strategic resource cost, etc).
• UFOs are intercepted as they try to escape Earth after having sparked an "event". Successfully shooting them down opens a ground combat mission that may unlock new alien technology and resources, but does not prevent ground missions occurring.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/...3242-Xenonauts-2-Further-Strategy-Development

Seems I'm alone in thinking this, but this strikes me as boring. Takes the whole main appeal of UFO Defense and puts it into the background. Alien infiltration was a cool aspect of UFO Defense, but the game being just Cold War + Aliens on the side seems like they went way too far down the rabbit hole for fans of the original game they were copying.

 

[Stavrophore]

Cleaner missions are extremely unbalanced and unenjoyable, the other timed missions are also annoying, but cleaners shit takes the cake. They spawn out of nowhere, have good accuracy and kill your soldiers easily. Harder to fight than aliens, really annoying.
Also there's no sidestepping mechanic, so imagine this, you open the door, see nothing[45 degree cone doesn't reigster enemies on the other side of the door just to the left or right] move one tile to rotate, and bam you get blasted. Instead we should be able to side step which would give huge bonus to reaction fire prevention.

 

[Joggerino]

I tried it out as well but can't really add anything new to the discussion. It's the same old xenonauts except unfinished and unbalanced.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Overall Strategic Summary:

• The aliens no longer have the capability to win an outright war with humanity - instead, they are secretly infiltrating our society and attempting to trigger nuclear war between NATO and the USSR.
• The world will be divided into 10 regions, as it is in Xenonauts. However they will all be assigned to either the NATO, USSR or Non-Aligned sphere of influence.
• There are DEFCON counters for NATO and the USSR. Alien activity in the respective territories will increase the appropriate DEFCON counter, and activity in non-aligned states is split between the two.
• Alien activity sparks Geoscape "events", which consist of a potentially dangerous event and several solutions for the player to choose from (each choice will spawn a different ground combat mission or have an associated strategic resource cost, etc).
• UFOs are intercepted as they try to escape Earth after having sparked an "event". Successfully shooting them down opens a ground combat mission that may unlock new alien technology and resources, but does not prevent ground missions occurring.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/...3242-Xenonauts-2-Further-Strategy-Development

Seems I'm alone in thinking this, but this strikes me as boring. Takes the whole main appeal of UFO Defense and puts it into the background. Alien infiltration was a cool aspect of UFO Defense, but the game being just Cold War + Aliens on the side seems like they went way too far down the rabbit hole for fans of the original game they were copying.

well you'll be delighted to know that this was 8 years ago before they decided to just make a reskin re-release of xenoderps 1 instead

 

[Zeriel]

Overall Strategic Summary:

• The aliens no longer have the capability to win an outright war with humanity - instead, they are secretly infiltrating our society and attempting to trigger nuclear war between NATO and the USSR.
• The world will be divided into 10 regions, as it is in Xenonauts. However they will all be assigned to either the NATO, USSR or Non-Aligned sphere of influence.
• There are DEFCON counters for NATO and the USSR. Alien activity in the respective territories will increase the appropriate DEFCON counter, and activity in non-aligned states is split between the two.
• Alien activity sparks Geoscape "events", which consist of a potentially dangerous event and several solutions for the player to choose from (each choice will spawn a different ground combat mission or have an associated strategic resource cost, etc).
• UFOs are intercepted as they try to escape Earth after having sparked an "event". Successfully shooting them down opens a ground combat mission that may unlock new alien technology and resources, but does not prevent ground missions occurring.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/...3242-Xenonauts-2-Further-Strategy-Development

Seems I'm alone in thinking this, but this strikes me as boring. Takes the whole main appeal of UFO Defense and puts it into the background. Alien infiltration was a cool aspect of UFO Defense, but the game being just Cold War + Aliens on the side seems like they went way too far down the rabbit hole for fans of the original game they were copying.

well you'll be delighted to know that this was 8 years ago before they decided to just make a reskin re-release of xenoderps 1 instead

Oh dear god I hate this new forum feature where it always sends you to the earliest "unread" post, and decides it's unread if you haven't been in the thread since the forum upgrade.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Played for a few hours - its OK, I just dont understand why they call this Xenonauts 2 when its Xenonauts: Director´s Cut or Xenonauts: Ultimate Edition at best. I am fine with the Cleaners and the few new mission types, but honestly this type of stuff could have come out as a DLC for X1 a decade ago and cost maybe 15 €. I have no idea what the devs were even doing all this time if this is all they got. If I didnt back the KS for a few bucks, there is no way I would drop 40 € they are asking for this now.

At this point I just hope that Goldhawk can stay afloat until they push this to version 1.0, I am quite curious if they survive the release of the game - I would assume that most fans of the X1 ended up backing the KS and that money is long gone. I seriously doubt they can pull in any significant number of new buyers given the price and what they offer for it, but we will see I guess.

 

[Atlantico]

What tees me off about Xenonauts 2 is the fact that they abandoned Xenonauts 1, and left it to the community to finish their game. Then they spent eight years working on Xenonauts 2, and all they have to show for it is a quasi-3D isometric--literally everything else besides some UI elements is the same from the old game. It's just double-dipping.

If it was EA, yeah I'd be pissed off too. This is more like one guy and whatever hirelings he can afford.

Xenonauts is as much a community project as it is a commercial one.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i don't understand. if there's one thing that pissed off x-com old farts in the latest xcom turd was timed missions. what do we have here now? timed missions.

 

[Stavrophore]

Xenonauts 2 doesn't know what it want to be, maybe if they knew what they want they wouldn't spend 8 years in pretty much limbo.

 

[StippleAlpha]

Ah the curse of the solo developer... Well at least the combat still sort of scratches the classic RPG itch and hasn't descended into the "one move, one shoot" style that's ubiquitous nowadays.

But yeah, timed missions... Oof. You're telling me I have a week to dispatch a helicopter, but once the squad gets there they've got like ten in-world minutes to do the job? It's just a shoehorned-in constraint

 

[Average Manatee]

Here I was trying to ignore xenonauts 2 hoping to be pleasantly surprised whenever it came out. Now it looks like it's still Xenonauts 1

 

[StippleAlpha]

On a side note, idk if you guys have played "Terra Invicta". It's not an RPG and it's aggressively early access... but it's like ok, if you have a small amount of initial funding to stop an alien invasion do you: a). spend it on a couple of jets and a helicopter with ten guys in it, or b). spend it mobilizing the cash and resources of all the most influential nations and organizations on Earth to organize a superproject of unprecedented scale that will carry out a crash-course of outer space development to take the fight to the aliens throughout the outer solar system? The different countries actually fight against the aliens, and if alien armies manage to land, nukes are very much in play. Once you "can into space", you go from getting your entire armada of armed spaceships obliterated by a tiny alien scout to going toe-to-toe with assault carriers using plasma tech adapted from captured alien vessels. None of this "capture the alien overseer to disable the fleet" bullshit--you gotta take the fight to the aliens and I love it. Models the solar system and orbital spaceflight realistically, too.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it sounds actually much worse.

 

[ropetight]

On a side note, idk if you guys have played "Terra Invicta". It's not an RPG and it's aggressively early access... but it's like ok, if you have a small amount of initial funding to stop an alien invasion do you: a). spend it on a couple of jets and a helicopter with ten guys in it, or b). spend it mobilizing the cash and resources of all the most influential nations and organizations on Earth to organize a superproject of unprecedented scale that will carry out a crash-course of outer space development to take the fight to the aliens throughout the outer solar system? The different countries actually fight against the aliens, and if alien armies manage to land, nukes are very much in play. Once you "can into space", you go from getting your entire armada of armed spaceships obliterated by a tiny alien scout to going toe-to-toe with assault carriers using plasma tech adapted from captured alien vessels. None of this "capture the alien overseer to disable the fleet" bullshit--you gotta take the fight to the aliens and I love it. Models the solar system and orbital spaceflight realistically, too.

Terra Invicta has a great potential, but it is completely different kind of game - RtwP RTS with lots of Grand Strategy elements.
Mix low-tech Solar system based Stellaris with XCOM geosphere and streamlined Grand strategy elements.

I just hope that they will ease on politics & spying on Earth and put more focus on the Solar system exploration and battles.
Playing Crusader Kings with spaceports is not bad, but playing The Expanse Origin story could be so much better game.

 

[Darkozric]

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

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.

 

[oscar]

I wasn't massively impressed with the first game and this looks like an arguable step-down if anything. Wonder what the hell they've been doing for the past eight years of development (I suppose the 3D engine since the gameplay seems very rough, buggy and imbalanced).

 

[jungl]

I was disappointed there are bugs like I couldn't climb a ladder in a map. 8 years and they still did not complete the game wtf. I can't remember what the fan mods added in xenonauts 1 but you can't go back to the crap engine of the original when you tried the 3d one.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Our (Updated) Plans for Xenonauts 2
The launch of Xenonauts 2 has been a huge success so far, with over 30,000 people buying the game since Tuesday. It's been an amazing (and exhausting) experience for us here at Goldhawk and we want to offer a genuine thankyou to everyone that has supported us!

With so many people playing the game, we've also been provided with an enormous amount of feedback about the good and bad parts of the current Xenonauts 2 experience. Although we're still sorting through this, I wanted to quickly discuss a few issues that have come up repeatedly and explain how we're planning to address them. They are:

• Bugs & Stability
• Performance & Loading Times
• Timed Missions
• Similarities to Xenonauts 1
• Modding Tools

Bugs & Stability:
Fixing any crashes, hangs and other game-breaking bugs is our highest priority issue. The sheer number of people playing the game means lots of bugs have been found, and we've set everything else aside and are working hard to fix them as quickly as possible.

I think we're making good headway on these stability issues given the small size of our team, but we're not quite there yet. We appreciate your patience while we work through these issues - we've only got two programmers and they need to sleep once in a while!

Performance & Loading Times:
There's been a lot of complaints about the loading times in the game. This is something we were initially planning on optimizing further closer to final launch, but based on community feedback we'll be moving this work forwards,

In the meantime, it may be possible to reduce loading times by installing Xenonauts 2 on the fastest hard drive you have available (as load speeds in our game are governed largely by the hard drive speed).

Also, we suspect there is a memory leak in the game. If you've been playing for a couple of hours and loading times or general performance feels a lot worse than at the start of your play session, please reboot the game and it should return to normal (we will be looking into the memory leak once the crashes are dealt with).

Timed Missions:
Although many people enjoy the new timed missions in Xenonauts 2, there's also a sizable group who very much dislike the concept. We are going to be adding campaign options that allow you to adjust these timers, allowing people who enjoy the missions to tweak the timings to their own preferences and those who dislike them to remove the time pressure entirely (e.g. by increasing them to 99 turns).

Again, this was originally planned for later in development but based on player feedback we have decided to bring it forwards. Of course, we'll also be continuing to balance and improve these missions throughout Early Access - so hopefully far fewer people will want to skip them in the final game anyway!

Similarities to Xenonauts 1:
While many people do already feel like Xenonauts 2 is distinct enough to stand apart from its predecessor, not everyone agrees with this.

While I do understand this view, I think it is important to remember that Xenonauts 2 is not yet finished. There's a lot more improvements and content planned for Early Access, and the game will feel less and less like the original Xenonauts (and more and more superior to it) with every new update.

It's probably also worth pointing out that the original Xenonauts wasn't particularly well received when it first launched into Early Access back in 2013 (thankfully before the days of Steam reviews), but the community feedback and sales revenue allowed us improve the game dramatically - and I'm sure the same will be true for the sequel!

Modding Tools:
Although the entire game isn't editable with a text editor like the first Xenonauts was, we've still designed Xenonauts 2 to support modding and have already done a fair bit of work under the hood to ensure that they will work properly with the game.

However, manually editing the compressed json files used by the game with a text editor is not the most straightforward process. As such, we've been chatting to members of the Xenonauts 1: Community Edition team about the possibility of taking an editing tool we developers created a few years back and building it into a community-led standalone modding tool.

It's therefore possible that modding tools might be arriving much sooner than expected - but we can't make any firm promises here, as we're still just exploring the possibility at this stage!

---

Development Roadmap
Finally, in addition to the points raised above, you can see what our longer-term plans for Xenonauts 2 are on the Development Roadmap outlined in our previous update!

 

[Doktor Best]

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

 

[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.