KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

[ropetight]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/538030/view/3900742181599200398

Milestone 2 Update Released!
Our first major Early Access update to Xenonauts 2 has now officially been released - please be aware that this update breaks existing save games, but if you want to keep playing your existing campaigns please switch to our Legacy branches where you can keep playing Milestone 1 (instructions on how to do so here.)

We're going to be watching the Steam forums carefully for feedback and bug reports, so please let us know if you encounter any bugs or other problems!

As we've made a LOT of changes to the game in this update, I'll start by highlighting the most important improvements here with a little developer commentary (the full changelog is further down).
Key Changes:
Cleaner / Early Mission Rework:
A lot of players mentioned that the pacing in Milestone 1 felt off. Many people liked the addition of the Cleaners, but felt they were barely involved in the game. They didn't feel threatening, and their whole storyline could be completed in as little as two or three missions. This contributed to an overall feeling of being rushed through the game content.

We've extended the playable time to 200 days by adding additional content to the beginning of the game. Most of this is related to the Cleaners, with a number of extra tactical missions and mission types being added to make the most of the unique opportunities provided by having an alien-aligned human faction in the game.

The storyline of the game has been rewritten to reflect this. We've returned the player to being a silent protaganist, and introduced The General (the predecessor of the Commander) as antagonistic character that appears in the tutorial and the first mission. The early game now has a little more narrative than it did previously, and it's worth replaying the tutorial if you're interested in the lore.

The entirely new mission types include Rescue Soldiers, Convoy Ambush and Rescue VIP, but in general we've created a larger pool of Cleaner missions (with more map variants) that can be randomly chosen. You'll now spend more time fighting the Cleaners, and there should be enough variety that it does not become boring or repetitive!

Panic & Funding Rebalance:
On harder difficulty settings, Milestone 1 had an issue where the player was forced to spend a large amount of their income building new bases and aircraft right from the very beginning of the game - otherwise Panic would rapidly get out of control, either causing you to lose the game directly or causing your funding to drop significantly. There was therefore only one "correct" way to play the strategy layer, which made the game less fun.

We've made several changes that give players more initial flexibility. Panic now drops by 10% per region at the end of each month, and funding is now no longer affected by Panic level (provided you haven't lost the region). Of course, expanding early is still a very strong strategy - but you can now experiment with other options too.

Probe UFO:
As the "Cleaner phase" at the start of the game is now quite a lot longer, we had to push back the point where the Scout UFO began to spawn. This meant we needed to add a new UFO to the early game that didn't produce crash sites or unlock too much advanced technology.

The new unmanned Probe UFO appears in the very early stages of the game. This small UFO does not create crash sites, but instead creates wreckage that awards a small amount of Alloys when shot down. Because it is relatively weak, we also use it as an early-game escort craft once larger UFOs start to appear.

Aircraft Payload System & Air Combat:
In Xenonauts 2 we want the aircraft equipment loadouts to be more varied and flexible than they were in Xenonauts 1, giving the player more space to customise their aircraft to fight in different ways.

Interceptors no longer have fixed weapon slots that can only take particular types of weapons. Instead, they can now carry a much wider variety of weapons and equipment - but they have to respect a total Payload limit (i.e. equipment weight).

There's also been a significant amount of balancing work done on the air combat itself, making the difficulty curve of the invasion fairer and making the air combat battles themselves more engaging.

"Heavy" Soldier Armour Variants:
One of the less cool things in Milestone 1 was that you could research advanced new armour types and then discover that many of your soldiers just weren't strong enough to use it (the Guardian was the worst offender here). Conversely, stronger soldiers had little opportunity to carry heavier armour beyond equipping the armour plate module (which filled backpack space).

Each type of soldier armour in the game now has a "heavy" variant that is enabled by a checkbox. This provides extra armour, but also adds extra weight (and usually reduces Accuracy slightly). This gives the player more choice when equipping their soldiers, and allowed us to consolidate the starting Tactical Suit / Defender Armour into a single item.

Civilian AI Improvements:
Players frequently complained about how incredibly dumb / suicidal the civilians were in Milestone 1, so we decided to fix this.

We fixed several bugs that were interfering with the AI (which should make all AI units a bit more effective) and then we worked on the civilian AI specifically, to make them behave in a more realistic manner. This work also lays the foundations for upgrades to the alien AI in Milestone 3.

CHANGELOG - Gameplay Changes:
Economy:

• Cash can now go negative on the strategy layer due to upkeep / wage costs. If you have negative funds after receiving your monthly income for two consecutive months, you lose the game.
• Funding is no longer dependent on Panic level (unless the region is actually lost).
• The starting base has one less Hangar and one less Angel interceptor.
• Aircraft are slightly more expensive to build, and you now have to pay for their equipment items indvidually.
• Cost for constructing new bases has been reduced from $750k to $500k.
• Soldier cost increased from $10k to $20k.
• Upkeep on base structures and aircraft increased by 50%.
• Upkeep costs for upgraded buildings (e.g. Alenium Generators) reduced to match those of their basic equivalent.
• Slightly updated the construction cost and sell prices of all manufactured soldier weapons. Shotguns and Rifles are now slightly cheaper, Gauss weapons are more expensive, and Lasers & Gauss weapons have higher starting sale prices.

Alien Invasion:

• Panic now falls by 10% of the current total in each region at the end of the month.
• Shooting down a UFO now reduces Panic by -1, rather than -2.
• The Cleaner Base no longer continually spawns Panic-raising anomalies on the Geoscape until destroyed. Instead, the Cleaners generate regular tactical missions on the Geoscape that will raise Panic if you do not complete them (these stop when the Cleaner Base is destroyed).
• Most alien activity now occurs a couple of weeks later than it did in Milestone 1, as this makes space for the extra Cleaner missions. There's a couple of extra early-game research projects to fill this space.
• The new Probe UFO is the first type of UFO to spawn. It is unmanned and so does not generate crash sites, and is weak enough that even a basic Angel can take it down relatively easily. Because the player only starts with one Angel and missiles / torpedoes now need to be researched, Scout UFOs are quite a lot more dangerous than they were in Milestone 1.

Air Combat:

• All aircraft equipment now has to be built individually for your aircraft, rather than being unlocked as a global upgrade.
• Most weapon damage values have been changed to take into account the new slot system on the interceptors.
• Updated the stats on most UFOs and updated their weapon loadouts, including adding a new "hunter-killer missile" weapon to some types of UFO.
• Missiles and Torpedoes are no longer starting items and need to be researched.
• Added two new equippable items for aircraft - Armour and Fuel Pods.
• The UFO health balancing system that would occur based on the number of aircraft in your squadron has now been disabled, as it seemed too easy to exploit.
• Damage dealt by UFOs is now modified by the difficulty setting, ranging from 80% of normal on Recruit to 120% of normal on Commander.
• The autoresolve damage of certain weapons is now reduced against targets that can evasive roll, as the autoresolve formula could generate some strange results where powerful but easily dodged weapons were involved.
• All UFOs now use a dynamic battlefield in the air combat, where it moves based on the position of the main UFO. This prevents them flying off the map entirely.
• When an interceptor runs out of fuel and chooses to retreat from combat, it now does the updated Retreat action where it escapes after 3 seconds (rather than the old retreat action where they need to fly to the edge of the map).

Heavy Armour:

• All soldier armours now have a "Heavy Armour" checkbox that increases the protection offered at the cost of additional weight and a small Accuracy reduction.
• Defender Armour has been removed, as it is now the heavy variant of the starting Tactical Armour.
• Armour Plate modules have been removed, as this new system makes them redundant.

Tech Tree:

• Added a number of new projects related to the new content in this patch.
• All research projects should now have research text, and various existing projects have been edited to reflect the updated story.
• Autopsies are no longer autocomplete missions, and can be researched after completing Xenobiology.
• Completing an autopsy research unlocks "Corpse Analysis" engineering projects for that alien species. This consumes corpses to provide a 10% and eventually a 20% damage bonus against that type of alien.
• Assault Shield upgrade project has been moved earlier in the tech tree, and now unlocks at a similar time to Guardian armour.

Weapons & Equipment:

• Modules can now be moved around inside the backpack, and dropped / picked up from the ground in battle.
• Ammo loaded into weapons now has weight. We have therefore also reduced the weight of all weapons by roughly the weight of their default ammo clip.
• Rebreather module added as a starting item. This makes units smoke immune.
• Stun Baton is now a starting item.
• Stun Baton and Combat Knife are now 3x1 items rather than 3x2.
• Machinegun ammo is now 2x1 rather than 1x1.
• Machineguns now require 51% TU to fire the 3-round burst, not 50%.
• HEVY now uses %-based fire modes, like all other weapon types.
• HEVY has been reduced in weight.
• HEVY grenades no longer inflict reduced damage if they miss the target and detonate beyond the maximum range of the gun.
• HEVY Smoke Rounds no longer destroy enemy armour.
• Added unique artwork for the HEVY Alenium / Fusion grenades.
• Added unique artwork for all the different Gauss weapon ammo magazines

Tactical Combat:

• Civilian AI has been updated to make them less suicidal.
• Crouching now provides a 10% Accuracy bonus, but only 10% defensive bonus (down from 20%).
• Units have their Accuracy reduced by 0.25% for each 1% of missing Health. This also includes soldiers who are sent into battle not fully healed!
• Stun Damage now heals more quickly (the greater of 25% of current Stun HP, or 5 HP).
• On Xenonaut Base Defence missions, the player is now given vision on all alien units after 10 turns.
• Time Units costs for fire modes now have a minimum of 1 Time Unit, as hugely overloaded soldiers were able to fire their weapons an unlimited number of times.
• Time Units are no longer refunded if an overweight soldier drops an item to reduce their TU penalty, as this permitted an exploit where units could use multiple 51%+ TU actions per turn. However, overweight TU penalties are only applied when you close the inventory screen so you're free to shuffle items about as long as the weight is at acceptable limits when you close the screen.
• Fleeing units now drop their Secondary weapon in addition to their Primary.
• Berserking will now always choose a random inanimate object as a target if no alien is nearby, and the soldier may recieve some bonus TU that allows them to fire more than normal if they berserk.
• Laser weapons now have significantly reduced recoil compared to kinetic weapons for flavour reasons.
• Grenades now always damage shields if the unit carring the shield is in the blast radius.
• Shields will offer protection from grenade damage, but only if they're facing towards the tile where the grenade exploded.
• Jetpack move costs have been increased slightly, which means soldiers will now only use the jetpack if they cannot walk the path instead.
• Increased the damage multiplier required to gib units with a normal attack from 2x their maximum health to 2.5x their max health.
• Accuracy of Rifle burst fire modes has been increased from 40 to 45.

Tactical Aliens:

• Secton Psionic Triangulation now triggers when Sectons are near Psyons, rather than near other Sectons. This means they're less deadly if you encounter them in a group in early missions but equally threatening once Psyons start appearing.
• All Cleaner units have lost -5 Accuracy and -10 Time Units, as their stats were similar (and occasionally stronger) than those of the aliens.
• 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).
• Servitor weapon has been reduced from 70 Suppression to 30 Suppression.
• Increased alien HP to counterbalance the corpse analysis damage increase. Early-game aliens have no increase, mid-game aliens get +10% HP, and late-game aliens get +20% HP.

Usability / Visual Changes:
Strategy:

• The icon for the Skyhawk dropship has been updated so it doesn't look like it is flying backwards.
• Mission briefings now accurately display the turn limits / reinforcement timers for timed missions, even when this value is modified by the difficulty setting.
• 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.
• The soldier portrait is now shown on hover on the Soldier screen soldier list.
• On the Soldier Equip screen, if you drag an item out of a slot and drop it into empty space, it now disappears and returns to the base stores rather than snapping back to its previous location.
• The "Items Arrived" popup will now split the list by base if items simultaneously arrive at multiple bases.
• The Damage value for weapons on their tooltip is now modified by the ammo loaded (e.g. the HEVY shows 0 damage if loaded with smoke rounds).
• The equipment selection menus on the Aircraft screen have been updated so they size themselves dynamically, which means they can display more weapons without having issues.
• The "Commence Research" button on the Research screen is now visually disabled if you have no research available.
• There's now a +5 Turn mission timer option for people who wanted more than +3 but less than +99.

Tactical Soldier Inventory:

• You can now scroll through soldiers using the left / right arrows, or by pressing the number hotkeys.
• Scrolling past a vehicle without an inventory (e.g. MARS) now simply skips past it, rather than closing the inventory screen.
• Added a "Reset Item Moves" button that resets all item moves and refunds all TU spent.
• Added a new line that shows the current TU of the soldier.
• Improved the way items stack when dropped on the ground (usually by a dead combatant).

Tactical:

• Added a 3D model for a military officer. One variant of this is used for The General in the ATLAS Base mission, while another is used for the Cleaner Leaders on VIP Elimination missions.
• Units will now automatically path to the intended location if using a melee weapon or placing C4 from more than one tile away.
• Updated the Combat Shield animations so it is held straight (especially when crouching).
• Updated the human Pistol animations, making it more obvious that the unit is armed with a pistol rather than being unarmed.
• Move paths for jetpack-equipped soldiers now display properly.
• Fixed various issues with the TU reserve system (which can be accessed by right-clicking the various weapon fire modes).
• 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.
• Combat Shields now play an appropriate impact sound if hit by enemy fire, and a destruction sound if destroyed. They also play a spark visuel effect if they absorb all the damage, rather than a blood splatter.
• C4 now shows its blast radius once laid if you hover over the detonator, and will display a "Are you sure?" popup if you try to detonate it with a unit in the blast radius.
• Using Tab or Next Soldier to cycle through your soldiers now works correctly with soldier number 10 (who was previously being placed last).
• The combat camera zoom now switches between five preset distances, and the alt+scrollwheel zoom shortcut should now work correctly.
• The 3D models of dropped items are now placed within the tile to look like they are laying on the ground. Weapons in the hands of dead bodies are now also hidden (as those weapons are being shown as an item on the ground).
• Throwing a grenade through a window now shatters it.
• Healing stun damage with a medikit now displays "Stun: -X" rather than "Stun: X", as some people thought the medikit was causing stun damage.
• Fixed several visual issues with the Alenium Generator objects in the Xenonaut Base defence missions.

Bugfixes:
Strategy / General:

• Fixed a cursor offset bug that could occur if you tried to switch Xenonauts 2 between multiple monitors with different screen resolutions.
• Fixed various issues with the following achievements: First Contact, Counterfire, Unfriendly Fire, Welcome To Earth, Future Warfare.
• Fixed surviving soldiers being labelled as "Wounded" rather than "Survived", and not showing a recovery time.
• Fixed a bug where you could go overcapacity when hiring scientists / engineers if you had space free at a different base.
• Fixed various visual issues with the hair / jaw of certain soldiers and the collars of certain types of armour.
• Removed the "do you want to save?" popup on quit if the player is playing Iron Man mode.
• Fixed an incorrect error message when trying to build the Gauss Blaster without completing Accelerated Cannon first.
• Fixed the visual highlight when hovering over the names of unassigned wounded soldiers.
• If you get the "You have some empty slots in the dropship!" message when trying to launch a dropship, clicking the Assign Soldiers button now leaves you on the assignment screen so you can do the assignment (previously it incorrectly used Auto-Fill and launched the dropship).
• 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).
• Fixed a typo on the Xenonaut base defence mission briefing.

Tactical Combat:

• Fixed smoke and suppression damage incorrectly passing through undamaged solid walls or closed doors.
• Fixed Combat Shields not functioning correctly or displaying correctly if picked up off the ground.
• Fixed the Secton glowing eyes that indicate Psionic Triangulation being active not triggering correctly.
• Fixed aliens and humans being revealed if they are stunned when the player does not have line of sight on them.
• Fixed dead soldiers sometimes surviving even when the player has a 0% survival chance.
• Fixed moving items around the inventory incorrectly not deducting TU in some cases.
• Fixed units being able to shoot themselves when using Ctrl+Shift to preview move & shoot actions.
• Fixed various issues that would occur when you pick up and drop corpse items, as sometimes the game was not properly reflecting the new location of the body (both visually and mechanically).
• Fixed units not playing their death animation correctly if they are stunned, then revived, then stunned / killed again.
• Fixed fleeing units dropping their weapons but their 3D model not updating to show they are now unarmed.
• Fixed revived units still visually holding the weapon they were carrying when they were stunned, despite them being unarmed and the gun being on the floor.
• Fixed HEVY soldiers incorrectly using 1-handed weapon animations if they switch to a pistol and then back to the HEVY.
• Fixed the 3D models of items on the ground not being removed if an explosion destroys those items.
• Fixed a misleading error message about uncrouching.
• Fixed blood puddles not correctly hiding when you changed camera level.
• Fixed camera incorrectly snapping to an alien the player cannot see going through a teleporter.
• Fixed an issue where an unloaded weapon would display 0/0 ammo, rather than 0/X.
• Fixed melee weapons causing the target to play their injury sound twice.
• Fixed the player gaining 50 Alenium simply by visiting an Alien Base and aborting the mission.
• Fixed hitbox issues with the main door on some of the larger UFOs (from Observer up).
• Fixed an issue with the Observer UFO sometimes having invisible terrain objects near its front door.
• Fixed destroyed doors in the Alien Base maps still showing the open / close door icon.
• Fixed the Electroshock Rifle having the incorrect silhouette in the minitabs at the top of the screen.
• Fixed melee attacks not causing units to rotate to face the attacker.
• Fixed AI units that are able to crush objects by walking through them absolutely trashing the interior of their UFO / base as they patrol around.
• Fixed teleporters triggering if you do not deliberately end your move on them.
• Fixed the Flares not appearing for a soldier if you Tab to them after having a vehicle selected.
• 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.
• Fixed there being a floating walkable tile in the air next to the caravans on the Desert maps.
• The radar and other large props in the Xenonaut base (like base defence turrets) can no longer be walked inside once they'd taken enough damage.
• Pressing C when a unit is in motion will correctly queue up a crouch icon (as if you clicked the Crouch button).
• Fixed the generators in the Xenonaut base defence Generator Room not allowing units to path through them once destroyed.
• 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 an issue where the Cyberdrone frontal shield was not correctly being destroyed by explosives.
• 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.
• Park trellises no longer block vision, as they're clearly transparent.
• Fixed smoke tiles being visually duplicated (so looking much thicker) after loading a saved game.

Well done for reading all the way through!

By the type of the issues they are fixing, game is still unplayable mess.
But at least publisher and early access will force them to finish whatever they started.
In the end that could still be underwhelming, but at least it will not be vaporware.

 

[Alienman]

By the type of the issues they are fixing, game is still unplayable mess.

It's not though. Feel pretty tight currently, it's just a shame EA limited the game to 200 days. However, the map pool is still way too small. And the fixes are for the better, like the armor and plane system. I highly recommend turning off the air scaling, since I just find it weird as hell. Even without you can take down UFOs while being outgunned if you play it safe in manual, and it makes the urgency of the airgame put some pressure on you. With it on, you don't have to care that much, but I think it scales up encounters too.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
Hello everyone - we've reached the end of November, so it's time for our monthly development update. This month has been fairly intense but once again the project has made good progress.

Milestone 2
The biggest news is the official release of Milestone 2, our first major update since the game's Early Access launch. I discussed the many upgrades made in Milestone 2 here so I won't cover them again, but getting everything ready for this release took up most of the month.

Our thanks go out to all the testers who were reporting bugs and giving gameplay feedback on the Experimental branches over the past couple of months, as it has been incredibly valuable!

Broadly speaking, all this testing meant Milestone 2 launched in pretty good shape - but we've already patched a few major bugs and put out a fix for the funding situation being overly restrictive on the easier difficulty settings. We're continuing to monitor stability and balance issues, so please do let us know if you're encountering problems and we'll consider further patches!

Milestone 3
Although Milestone 2 is barely out the door, we're already hard at work on Milestone 3. This update contains the alien Cruiser UFO, which is crewed by aliens carrying deadly Fusion weapons. If you can successfully capture one of these Cruisers, you can unlock the final interceptor and dropship aircraft, plus another tier of infantry weapons and an upgrade for the MARS that turns it into a hovertank.

We'll also be continuing to work on the alien AI and the air combat, and we're hoping to add various community-requested features into this update too (e.g. the ability to autosell "junk" items after combat). Finally, we're expecting Milestone 3 will have significantly improved loading times compared to earlier versions of the game!

Unity 2022 Upgrade
These faster load times will be happening partly because we're in the process of upgrading from Unity 5.5 to Unity 2022. We've already done the necessary technical work for this, but there's always teething issues with a major engine upgrade, so I expect we'll have to spend a couple more weeks fixing things up before things are fully back to normal.

Players should see faster load times and better performance when this work is complete, along with proper support for multiple monitors and borderless windowed mode etc. It will also make development work more efficient, as the codebase compiles much more quickly etc. Finally, it'll also bring us one step closer to mod tools - as some of the work we'll be doing upgrading our internal editor tools could be re-used to create a more effective mod editor.

I think I'll wrap things up there. If all goes well, we might have an early prototype of Milestone 3 ready for people to play on the Experimental branch by mid-December (if not, it'll be early January). Thanks for reading!

 

[Alienman]

A Brit and a German in alien containment...

 

[Alienman]

Here is a small interview I did with Chris England over e-mail. You can read it here, or down below if interested.

Spoiler

Merry Christmas to us all, because here is the legendary Chris England to answer a few questions for us about the development of the Xenonauts franchise. As probably most of you know, Chris England with his company Goldhawk Interactive created the great X-com inspired Xenonauts (read my review here). The sequel Xenonauts 2 is currently under full production in Early Access over at Steam & GOG, and it’s looking good too. It’s expected to be released sometime next year (read my latest impressions here).

---

Let’s start from the beginning. What prompted you to make a game in the X-com genre? Tell us about the struggles of a first-time developer – what issues did you face (like the notorious game engine issue), Kickstarter tales, game journalist response, the included book, etc?

The original X-Com (from 1994) was a game I played a huge amount when I was in my early teens – I found it in a discount bin and I’d never played anything like it before, and it totally blew my mind. It was such a complex game and the way the strategy layer and tactical layer were linked together was so cool to me, especially because the game was hard as nails and the missions could be so tense. I played the various spiritual successors as I got older (the UFO: Afterlight / UFO: Extraterrestrials games) but none of them really captured the magic for me – I just wanted someone to make an updated version that didn’t change the fundamental mechanics that much.

Once the indie revolution began and I saw independent game news sites popping up, covering these self-funded games by tiny indie studios (I think Mount & Blade was the first one I encountered) I realised that perhaps it was best I just did it myself – I’d read quite a few opinion pieces from people who loved X-Com and wished someone was making a proper follow-up to it. So I took my savings, which was a few thousand pounds at that point, and decided to give it a go. Once 2K announced the official XCOM reboot as a shooter (the one that eventually became The Bureau), we suddenly started getting loads of coverage and things started to snowball.

I wrote a development postmortem that shipped with the original Xenonauts that you can read if you want more details. I go into more detail about the engine issues and various other factors that affected development in that!

<<Chris attached a postmortem PDF that goes into much more detail that he allowed me to upload to the site. You can find it here!>>

From what I understand, a sequel to Xenonaut wasn’t a sure thing. I remember reading about other ideas you had on RPG Codex, like this mysterious Pathfinder game. Tell me about it. Were there other ideas as well? Why didn’t these ideas come to pass instead of Xenonauts 2?

Yeah, I was pretty keen to move onto new things after spending five years working on Xenonauts, and we explored a number of new ideas. But eventually we realised we were trying to change an awful lot of things at once – we were moving to a new game engine, moving from 2D to 3D art (which we had no expertise in), all while trying to set up the company in a different way so we could deliver higher-quality and bigger budget projects. With so much changing I eventually decided it would be sensible to stick with what we knew design-wise rather than add even more risk.

Pathfinders was the most developed of those ideas. The basic concept was that it would be a sci-fi Jagged Alliance style game, taking place in a large city. You’d have a large pool of soldiers and equipment you could requisition from, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, and you had to disarm the orbital defences so the rest of the military force could land and capture the city. The tactical combat was going to be closer to XCOM than Xenonauts, but it used the free-aim system from Valkyria Chronicles that Phoenix Point ended up using. But it ended up being too experimental given all other things we were trying to juggle at the time.

When it was established that Xenonauts 2 was going to be the next game, what kind of iterations did it go through?

The original design for Xenonauts 2 was quite different to what we’re planning to ship. Even looking at our Kickstarter page shows that. I had quite a few ideas for how to update the strategy layer, which involved adding depth in certain areas and simplifying it in others. Unfortunately we discovered about a year after the Kickstarter that some of the new ideas worked great on paper, but just weren’t as engaging as what previously existed – a good example of this is the turn-based Geoscape, where your aircraft would attempt interceptions with % chances of success that could be modified based on all kinds of factors (e.g. aircraft equipment, UFO behaviour, etc). This gave the players a lot more options to play with, and was more interesting mechanically… but just felt less engaging than actually being able to order your aircraft around on the Geoscape.

Unfortunately the new concept for the game was quite tightly designed, and once you started scrapping the mechanics that didn’t work well it would often undermine the new mechanics that worked fine. For example, having a single base on Geoscape like you do in XCOM is fine, provided it adds enough depth elsewhere – but if some of the new mechanics it enables get scrapped, it makes sense to move back to the old X-Com model instead. That left us in a situation where we could either ship a game that was different from the first game, but worse, or just shift emphasis and deliver a sequel that was similar to the first game but better.

In retrospect it’d probably have been more sensible to just ship a crap game and keep the Kickstarter money / whatever meagre sales we could make, but we decided it was more important to deliver a good game. It’s been a very long and rather stressful journey, but I think we probably made the right decision (both financially and professionally).

Now with it coming up for release, what do you think is the biggest difference or improvement from the first game? Is it what the first game should have been, or is it another take on the franchise completely? Any features you would have wanted to include, but for some reason didn’t make it?

Xenonauts 2 is what the first game would have been had we been experienced developers when we started out. There’s loads of improvements and additions made to the game, but there’s no single feature you can point to as a game-changer. But it’s gratifying to see so many of the Early Access reviews mention that the game is already a big improvement over the first and a worthy successor, because that’s the one thing we just weren’t sure about prior to launch – how many small changes does it take to make a worthwhile improvement? It seems that we’ve already made enough for most people, and there’s a lot more planned for the rest of Early Access.

There’s a few areas of the design I’ve been frustrated I couldn’t make major improvements to. I really wanted to make major improvements to the air combat, and update the Geoscape so more was happening and you could interact directly with the funding regions. But the classic X-Com formula is also a very tight design, and it’s tricky to add too much to it without ending up diluting other parts. We tested a number of ideas for both of those areas of the game, but none of the stuff we came up with was clearly better than what existed before – and, ultimately, my frustration with the other X-Com spiritual successors in the past is that they changed key parts of the classic X-Com mechanics for no real reason, so we decided to stay faithful to the source material. Again, I think this is the right decision, but a little frustrating as a designer.

Hopefully Xenonauts 2 will be the definitive classic X-Com game, and a whole new generation of young people will be able to experience the joys I had when I played that game!

---

I want to thank Chris for taking the time to answer my questions, considering he is a very busy man with finishing up Xenonauts 2. Hopefully, the game will be a big success, and we get to see more stuff coming from him in the future. I’m curious about what he and his team can come up with outside the X-com genre. The mercenary-esque “Pathfinder” game sounds intriguing to me. A Goldhawk take on Jagged Alliance, why not I say?

Thanks for reading.

I would have pumped him on more questions, but considering he is busy as heck, these 4 questions had to do.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Milestone 3.0.0 Released! (Experimental)
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 is our first test build for Milestone 3, and we're releasing it to test for stability issues that may have occurred as a result of us upgrading the game to use a newer version of Unity. The new content is included but still unpolished at this stage; we'll be finishing that off and starting to test it properly next week along with a further balance pass (assuming there's no widespread technical issues as a result of the Unity upgrade).

KEY CHANGES:

New Content: The playable time for the campaign has been extended to 260 days (from 180 days), during which time the Cruiser UFO will begin to spawn. This contains or unlocks several new pieces of content:

• Cruiser UFO (with two interior layout variants)
• Alien Fusion Weapons
• Xenonaut Fusion Weapons
• The Gemini interceptor
• The Pegasus dropship
• The ARES (an improved version of the MARS)
• At present we only have research text / art for some of these projects; the remainder will be finished by the end of next week.

Unity 2022: We've upgraded Xenonauts 2 to run on Unity 2022, which is a much more modern version of Unity than we were previously using. We've tested the game pretty heavily at this end and fixed most of the bugs we encountered, but now we need to see how the game works on a wider selection of hardware. Please give the game a test and let us know if you encounter any issues!

Borderless Fullscreen: Borderless Fullscreen mode should now be properly supported in Xenonauts 2. The monitor resolution settings are now handled natively by Unity 2022 rather than through our own code so we'd appreciate it if people can give this feature a test and see if it is working as intended, particularly if you have multiple monitors or some kind of unusual hardware setup.

Faster Loading: Load times should now be reduced by about 30% across all sections of the game, and we're hoping to reduce this by another 10%-20% in Milestone 4. However, please remember that this is an Experimental build and it has lots of extra logging that slow load times - for now, this is likely to cancel out any improvements compared to the "normal" build on the default branches!

We've also taken the opportunity to move the tactical mission briefing onto the loading screen, rather than showing it at the start of the mission. This gives you something to read while the mission loads, and allows you to get into the action faster once the load is complete!

AI Improvements: We've spent a lot of time working on the AI for this update, improving both the general decision-making of the AI and addressing various specific issues that have been affecting gameplay like:

• Civilians are now much less suicidal.
• Melee units (especially Reapers) should make better decisions.
• AI units will no longer just stand in fire / smoke until they die or pass out.
• The AI will now open doors even if the tile on the other side is blocked by another unit, allowing them to shoot at Xenonauts camping doors.
• Pre-Mission Soldier Equip / Arrangement: One frequently requested feature was to add a button on the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen that allows the player to easily access the screen where they can set the positions of their soldiers within the dropship. We've now implemented this, allowing you to easily switch back and forth between these screens prior to launching a dropship.

"Sell Junk Items" button: We've also added a button on the base stores screen that will set all "junk" items (e.g. items that are not used in research / engineering projects) to sell at maximum quantity. In future we may expand this system to allow autoselling items immediately after the mission, or we may add in a system where the reduced sale prices of items will increase over time (giving players an incentive not to always sell their junk immediately).

Bleeding Wound Healing & Bleeding Aliens: Aliens can now suffer Bleeding Wounds when they take damage in the same way that Xenonauts do. However, each Bleeding Wound now have a 25% chance of healing and disappearing after it inflicts damage at the end of the turn.

Unconscious units will now also continue to suffer damage from any bleeding wounds they suffered while conscious, and may die as a result.

Mission Updates & Balancing: We did a balance pass on the early game as part of our AI testing. A number of tweaks have been made to reflect the fact Convoy Ambush missions felt a little too easy, whereas the second Abduction Site mission, the Cleaner Leader Elimination missions and any early Base Defence missions felt harder than other missions. We've also made a number of changes to specific mission types:

Abduction missions:

• Abduction missions no longer end immediately when the abduction tubes disappear; the mission will now continue until all alien forces are eliminated (effectively these are now deathmatch missions with a time-limited optional objective). This change was made because many players reported that the abrupt ending of the mission in previous versions could feel quite jarring.
• You still gain Alien Alloys for each abduction tube you disable, but now you also gain -1 Panic in the local region for each surviving civilian that you released.
• The timer on abduction tubes has been reduced by 2 turns (from 8 turns to 6 turns).
• There's now a teleport animation when the tubes disappear.

Data Raid missions:

• These are the missions where you have to capture a certain number of Data Sticks from Cleaner computers. These have now been updated so victory is triggered off the number of computers you have interacted with (i.e. sabotaged), rather than how many Data Sticks you have brought back to the dropship.
• This change is unlikely to affect too many players, and was made because having a retreating soldier killed while carrying Data Sticks could completely ruin a mission. In most cases the mission will play out exactly the same as it did before.
• We've added a new UI element for this mission that shows how many Data Stick items are being carried by each soldier.
• The objectives now show how many turns remaining until the enemy reinforcements start appearing.
• Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn, unless the mission is encountered in month 1.

Extract VIP missions:

• At the start of the mission, the camera shows the empty dropship you are trying to reach before panning to the starting positions of your soldiers. This gives the player clarity over which direction they need to travel at the start of the mission.
• The VIP is now automatically added to your team at the start of the mission (rather than the player having to click on them).
• The VIP now has 50 TU rather than 40 TU.
• Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn (from 9 to 8)
• The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing.

Soldier Rescue missions:

• Many players did not appear to understand that you were expected to leave 3 free slots in your dropship on this mission, which gave you space to pick up the 3 soldiers that needed to be rescued. We have therefore added them to the dropship as "ghost soldiers" that fill those dropship slots (this means you can also view their stats prior to the mission).
• We've also updated the logic about which soldiers are recovered if the player does not leave those 3 free slots in their dropship. The game will now always pick living soldiers over dead soldiers (irrespective of their origin), and will prefer your existing soldiers to those you are supposedly trying to rescue.

Eliminate VIP mission:

• On Eliminate VIP missions, the camera will now pan to the VIP and show a message reading "VIP Sighted" when you see the target. It will also show a "VIP Eliminated" or "VIP Stunned" message at the appropriate points.
• The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing.

MINOR BALANCE CHANGES:
We found that soldiers were becoming too strong too quickly in previous builds and this problem was just getting worse as we extended the length of the campaign. We've therefore taken several steps to slow down soldier progression a little:

• Starting values for soldier attributes are now capped at 65 (previously 70)
• Starting soldiers are now Privates rather than Corporals.
• Reduced the speed at which soldiers gain combat experience to about 60% of the previous level.
• The training speed of the Training Room has been halved (both the starting value and the gain from completing Interrogation projects).

Other changes:

• It is no longer possible to see doors opening or closing under the fog of war, as this made the position of alien units very obvious. These doors will now only visually update when one of your units sees them.
• Sectons now trigger their Psionic Triangulation accuracy bonus from being near Psyons, not by being near other Sectons. However, if the Psyon is killed (and no other Psyon is nearby) the Secton will now immediately panic and lose all remaining TU.
• Duration of crash sites reduced from 72 hours to 32 hours.
• Medikit weight increased to 25 (from 15).
• Construction time of Radar Array reduced from 20 days to 15 days.
• Using a healing item will no longer trigger enemy reaction fire.
• Enabled reaction fire on the various alien melee weapons (mantids, sebillians, reapers, mentarch, zombies).

Air Combat balancing:

• Reduced construction cost of missiles / torpedoes by 20%
• Reduced upkeep for Angel from $100k to $75k per month
• Reduced upkeep for Phantom from $150k to $120k per month
• Destroyer UFO increased to 200HP (from 175).
• Fighter UFO turn rate increased by 50%.
• Fighter Cannon armour destruction increased to 2-5 (from 0-3).
• Abductor UFO increased to 275HP (from 250).
• Abductor Cannon range increased by 10%, armour destruction increased from 1-3 to 3-5, and reload time reduced from 0.75 sec to 0.5 sec. Projectile speed slowed down by 33%.
• Alien Interceptor Missiles armour destruction increased to 3-7 (from 0-4).

MINOR GAMEPLAY / CONTENT CHANGES:

• Added a number of new maps for Terror Sites / ATLAS Base / Cleaner Data Raid / Convoy Ambush / Rescue VIP missions.
• Added new 3D models for the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle, Accelerated Shotgun, Accelerated LMG, Alloy Shield, Stun Gun and Stun Baton.
• Added new 2D inventory tile art for the melee knife and the HEVY Smoke Rounds.
• Added Fusion weapons to the game. For any Kickstarter backers who saw the old incarnation of these weapons, we've updated the designs of the Shotgun and LMG and also given each weapon a unique ammo battery design.
• Added proper melee animations for the Mantid and Sebillian units.
• Units now play an injury sound and injury animation when struck with a stun weapon that does not inflict damage.
• Soldiers should now hide their carried weapon when performing their ladder climb animation.
• It is now possible to use any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters in soldier / aircraft / base names.
• Moved a check that was preventing a player launching an empty dropship from the Launch Aircraft screen to the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen instead (i.e. after you've had a chance to fill the dropship with soldiers).
• Stopping chance 0% objects are no longer highlighted on the fire path.
• Added a basic sort order system to the soldier loadout profiles.
• Units that can crush terrain now do not crush an open double door when they pass through it (most noticable inside UFOs and in Alien Base missions).
• The MARS now shows a custom "cannot interact" cursor when hovering over a mission objective item (like a computer desk) that soldiers can interact with but vehicles cannot.

BUGFIXES:

• Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to run a building upgrade project when having a large number of buildings (most commonly occurred with the Gauss Battery Upgrade project).
• Reloading a weapon in the tactical inventory now correctly plays the reload sound.
• Fixed a bug where the text on UFO information pop-ups was not being displayed for users playing in Chinese / Japanese / Korean.
• Fixed a bug where Unassigned soldiers are not showing certain items on their paperdoll image on the Soldier Equip screen (jetpacks, MARS weapons, etc).
• Fixed soldiers sometimes not being removed from the dropship even when reduced to below 50% HP.
• Fixed a bug where the Autofill Dropship button on the Soldier Equip screen could bypass the dropship vehicle limit.
• Fixed a bug where Senty Guns were incorrectly showing on the Soldier Equip screen in secondary bases (they should only appear before Base Defence missions, as that's the only time they can be used).
• Fixed a bug where the soldier paperdoll could get blurred if a certain combination of items were equipped
• Fixed a bug where the soldier portrait could disappear on the dropship soldier arrangement screen
• Fixed the bug where grenades could get stuck displaying a 0% hit chance.
• Fixed a bug where units could stand in mid-air at the top of a ladder.
• Fixed a bug where you could place two soldiers into the same destination tile if one of them was using a jetpack.
• Fixed a bug where unconscious units could not be revived with a medikit,
• Fixed a bug where the shoot/move preview hit calculations was not accurately updating the value for Wraith Cloaking Field based on the new soldier location being previewed.
• Fixed a bug where TU values could end up with a decimal point after a Berserk action.
• Fixed a bug where suppressing an enemy unit with reaction fire would not stop them finishing their planned movement.
• Fixed a bug where crouching during the pre-battle deployment phase on cerrtain missions cost TU, and did not refund it if you stood up.
• Fixed a bug where the crouch keyboard shortcut ("C") did not work during the pre-battle deployment phase.
• Fixed a bug where the combat shield was not disappearing after being destroyed.
• Fixed a bug where certain weapons could not be picked up from the ground after being dropped.
• Fixed certain objective items (mostly the computer desks) being incorrectly rotated in some situations.
• Fixed the Bleeding Wounds counter being displayed vertically if the unit has more than 10 Bleeding Wounds.
• Fixed the open door mouse cursor remaining active on the menu if you press Esc while hovering over a door.
• Fixed a visual issue where the green deployment area tiles could sometimes remain after the end of the deployment phase.
• Fixed throwing a grenade / flare onto the roof of a building causing windows on the floor below to shatter.
• Fixed some visual issues with the restaurant sign in the Western Town terror maps.
• Fixed a number of bugs with the Ultimate Power achievement (bring all Colonels to a mission).

 

[Alienman]

• These are the missions where you have to capture a certain number of Data Sticks from Cleaner computers. These have now been updated so victory is triggered off the number of computers you have interacted with (i.e. sabotaged), rather than how many Data Sticks you have brought back to the dropship.
• This change is unlikely to affect too many players, and was made because having a retreating soldier killed while carrying Data Sticks could completely ruin a mission. In most cases the mission will play out exactly the same as it did before.

Removing tension from the game seems like a huge mistake to me.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
Hello everyone - this month's update covers both December and January, as I was out of the office over new year. We've all returned refreshed from our Christmas break and we hope you all had a good festive season too!

Milestone 3
The biggest piece of news is that Milestone 3 is out on our Experimental branches for testing, with the goal of releasing the final version of Milestone 3 onto the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches on February 19th.

There's an extensive changelog for Milestone 3 which we'll post here when the update is out, although you can go to our official forums[www.goldhawkinteractive.com] to check out the testing patch notes.

This new build ticks off a number of content items on our roadmap: the Cruiser UFO, both alien and human Fusion Weapons, the third interceptor and dropship aircraft, plus the ARES (an upgraded hovering version of the MARS).

We're currently hotfixing the game on a daily basis to remove crashes and AI hangs encountered by our community, and we'll be focusing on smoothing out the game balance once the worst of the bugs are dealt with.

Unity 2022 - Load Times & Borderless Fullscreen
The biggest single task we've completed over the past couple of months has been upgrading to Unity 2022, which Milestone 3 now runs on. This has been quite disruptive, but worthwhile -- the update has enabled us to reduce load times by ~30% across all parts of the game, and we're hoping to further improve that to a ~50% reduction in the coming months.

The game now also properly supports Borderless Fullscreen mode, allowing you to freely Alt-Tab without issues (something a LOT of people in the community had been requesting). Players should encounter fewer issues with multi-monitor setups than before too.

The upgrade should also help speed up development somewhat. I won't bore you with the technical details, but code compiles much faster in 2022 relative to our older version and there's much more powerful debug tools available, so we'll collectively be spending a lot less time twiddling our thumbs while we wait to test our work.

AI Upgrades
The other major task we've been working on is AI improvements. The AI now has access to more information about the battlefield around it, and it's making much more sensible decisions in combat about where to position its units and how to attack.

However, we're still keeping a close eye on the AI because further tweaks or bugfixes may be required - even minor issues in the AI settings can cause AI units to do bizarre things in certain situations. But the good news is that these issues should now be easy to fix, and it's just a case of testing the game enough to find them all.

Specific AI improvements have been also made to the civilians (who were famously suicidal in older builds) and for melee aliens like Reapers, which had been struggling to attack effectively.

New Assets
The new content I already mentioned has been added for Milestone 3, and we've been adding lots of new maps to the game as well as a significant number of new 3D models for various soldier weapons that had previously been using placeholders. The research art for the new research projects is also largely complete and should be finished by the 19th.

Conclusion
Overall, it's been a productive couple of months for the team despite the disruption of the Christmas holidays. The Unity 2022 upgrade and the AI upgrades were both large tasks so it's nice to have them done, and I think Milestone 3 is going to be another significant upgrade for the game - once testing has ironed out all the kinks.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know if you encounter any bugs or issues when playing on the Experimental branch!

 

[Alienman]

Been testing the new patch a bit, and the enemy AI is very much improved. They are opening doors now to surprise your men, they also move a lot more and take some damn good decisions from time to time. Like going around the smoke to get a snipe in. The lizards are now making a beeline for close-quarters combat if they are close enough (since they have claws). It's terrifying The small robots are much more effective at pinning down your units, or just outright killing them. They have become very aggressive. These dudes were a pushover before, but deadly now. Getting a lot of casualties overall. The increased challenge is welcomed.

 

[Abu Antar]

All Events > Xenonauts 2 Events >

Milestone 3 Update Released! (v3.0.8)
Our Milestone 3 update to Xenonauts 2 has now officially been released! This update will
break existing saved games
, but if you want to keep playing your existing campaigns please switch to our Legacy branches where Milestone 2 is still available (instructions on how to do so here).

This initial version of Milestone 3 is an "developer" build with additional logging that causes slower performance and occasional flashes of red debug text while you play. We'll switch back to a normal "release" build without this extra logging by the end of the week.

We've decided to do this because we want to ensure anyone suffering issues from our upgrade to Unity 2022 can easily provide us the information to fix them - we'll be watching the forums / discord / Steam forums carefully for feedback and bug reports, so please let us know if you encounter any bugs or other problems!

As we've made a LOT of changes to the game in this update, I'll start by highlighting the most important improvements here with a little developer commentary.

KEY CHANGES:
New Content:
Additional content is always nice, and Milestone 3 contains the new Cruiser UFO which unlocks a lot of new technology for the player to play with! Although is still not possible to complete the campaign (that will be Milestone 5 as there's two more UFOs yet to come), the playable time for the campaign has been extended significantly.

The playable time for the campaign has been extended to 260 days (up from 180 days in Milestone 2), during which time the Cruiser UFO will begin to spawn. This contains or unlocks several new pieces of content:

• Cruiser UFO (with two interior layout variants)
• Alien Fusion Weapons
• Xenonaut Fusion Weapons
• The Gemini interceptor
• The Pegasus dropship
• The ARES (an improved version of the MARS)

Unity 2022:
Players have been requesting two major improvements that were struggling to deliver on our outdated version of Unity - faster load times, and proper support for borderless windowed mode. We therefore upgraded to Unity 2022 so we could give you those things in Milestone 3!

Borderless Fullscreen mode should now be properly supported in the settings menu. The monitor resolution settings are now handled natively by Unity rather than through our own code so please report any strange behaviour as a bug so we can look into it (particularly if you have multiple monitors or some kind of unusual hardware setup).

Load times should now be reduced by about 30% across all sections of the game, we're hoping to reduce this by another 10%-20% in Milestone 4 (
NOTE: this won't be apparent for the next few days, as all the extra debug logging from a "developer" build cancels out the improved loading speed
).

The tactical mission briefing is now also shown on the loading screen, rather than at the start of the mission, which gets you into the action faster once the load is complete!

AI Improvements:
Many players found the primitive AI in earlier versions of the game a bit immersion-breaking or easy to exploit. We've made significant AI upgrades in Milestone 3 that mean enemies should be more intelligent and civilians should be less suicidal. We're continuing to work on this, but personally I think a major improvement is already visible.

We've upgraded the general decision-making of the AI, and also addressing various specific issues including:

• Civilians are now much less suicidal.
• Melee units (especially Reapers) should make better decisions.
• AI units will no longer just stand in fire / smoke until they die or pass out.
• The AI will now open doors even if the tile on the other side is blocked by another unit, allowing them to shoot at Xenonauts camping doors.
• Cleaner reinforcements will now act more aggressively on most maps, and move quickly towards your dropship / extraction area.

Bleeding Wound Healing & Bleeding Aliens:
Community feedback suggested it was unfair that aliens did not suffer bleeding wounds like Xenonauts did - so now they do (although Sebillians heal them immediately). We've also added a heal chance to all Bleeding Wounds, so they're no longer a guaranteed death sentence if there's no Medikit nearby.

Aliens now suffer Bleeding Wounds when they take damage in the same way that Xenonauts do. However, each Bleeding Wound now has a 25% chance of healing and disappearing after it inflicts damage at the end of the turn.

Unconscious units will now also continue to suffer damage from any bleeding wounds they suffered while conscious, and may die as a result.

Usability Improvements:
Although Milestone 3 was focused on adding new content, we also added a couple of usability features that were frequently requested by the community to make soldier management and item management easier.

Pre-Mission Soldier Equip / Arrangement - we've added a button on the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen that allows easy access to the screen where you can set the positions of your soldiers within the dropship, allowing you to easily switch back and forth between these screens prior to launching a dropship.

"Sell Junk Items" button - we've also added a button on the base stores screen that will set all "junk" items (e.g. items that are not used in research / engineering projects) to sell at maximum quantity. We're likely to expand this system in future.

Abduction missions:
Abduction missions have been updated to address player concerns. They are now explained better, and no longer end immediately when the timer expires - but the Panic gain or reduction of the mission is now tied to the number of freed civilians, so the result should feel less arbitrary (now the civilian AI is improved, you're also expected to protect the civilians and you will get reduced rewards if they die).

• Abduction missions no longer end immediately when the timer expires and the abduction tubes disappear; the mission will now continue until all alien forces are eliminated (effectively these are now deathmatch missions with an additional time-limited objective).
• The timer on abduction tubes has been reduced by 2 turns (from 8 turns to 6 turns).
• There's now a teleport animation when the tubes disappear.
• You still gain Alien Alloys for each abduction tube you disable, but the Panic increase or reduction from the mission depends on how many of the 10 civilians you rescue:
  • If you don't attempt the mission at all, you get +20 local panic
  • +2 panic for each civilian remaining in an abduction tube when the timer runs out and the tubes teleport away
  • -2 panic for each civilian freed from an abduction tube that survives the mission
  • +0 panic for a civilian freed from the tube who is killed before the end of the mission

Data Raid missions:
These are the missions where you have to capture Data Sticks from the Cleaner office. Relatively minor changes here, just some UI improvements and a tweak to the objectives that means if a soldier carrying Data Sticks is killed you don't necessarily have to send another soldier to recover the Data Sticks from their body if you don't want to (this was mostly done for reasons of lore consistency).

• Victory is triggered off the number of computers you have interacted with (i.e. sabotaged), rather than how many Data Sticks you have brought back to the dropship.
• We've added a new UI element for this mission that shows how many Data Stick items are being carried by each soldier.
• The objectives now show how many turns remaining until the enemy reinforcements start appearing.
• Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn, unless the mission is encountered in month 1.

Extract VIP missions:
The changes made to the Extract VIP mission have all been around player convenience; making it more obvious where you need to go and when the enemy reinforcements will be arriving, etc.

• At the start of the mission, the camera shows the empty dropship you are trying to reach before panning to the starting positions of your soldiers.
• The VIP is now automatically added to your team at the start of the mission (rather than the player having to click on them).
• The VIP now has 50 TU rather than 40 TU.
• Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn (from 9 to 8)
• The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing.

Soldier Rescue missions:
Not all players understood that you were expected to leave 3 free slots in your dropship on this mission so you had space to pick up the 3 soldiers that needed to be rescued. To make this more obvious, we've added placeholder soldiers in the dropship that fill these slots (this also means you can view their stats prior to the mission).

• Added "ghost" soldiers to the dropship when launching towards the Soldier Rescue mission.
• Updated the logic about which soldiers are recovered if the player does not leave those 3 free slots in their dropship. The game will now always pick living soldiers over dead soldiers (irrespective of their origin), and will prefer your existing soldiers to those you are supposedly trying to rescue.

Eliminate VIP mission:

• On Eliminate VIP missions, the camera will now pan to the VIP and show a message reading "VIP Sighted" when you see the target. It will also show a "VIP Eliminated" or "VIP Stunned" message at the appropriate points.
• The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing.

MINOR BALANCE CHANGES:
Soldier Progression:
We found that soldiers were becoming too strong too quickly in previous builds and this problem was just getting worse as we extended the length of the campaign. We've therefore taken several steps to slow down soldier progression a little:

• Starting values for soldier attributes are now capped at 65 (previously 70)
• Starting soldiers are now Privates rather than Corporals.
• Reduced the speed at which soldiers gain combat experience to about 60% of the previous level.
• The training speed of the Training Room has been halved (both the starting value and the gain from completing Interrogation projects).
• However, the soldiers you can rescue on the Soldier Rescue missions now have +3 to all their base stats, in addition to the +3 to all stats they get for being a Sergeant rather than a Private.

Strategic Layer Balancing:

• Duration of crash sites reduced from 72 hours to 32 hours.
• Reduced the completion time of the initial research project, so you can now begin work on the new research immediately after winning the ATLAS Base mission.
• Delayed the first possible alien retaliation mission, as it would frequently spawn in the same wave as the first Destroyer (meaning the player had often just fought a battle when it happened and had a damaged squad).
• Reduced the number of Cleaners in the Cleaner Base to make it a bit more manageable if you manage to unlock it early.
• Wraith Destroyers now contain 1 fewer enemy.
• Increased Alloys gained from Observers, Abductors and Cruiser UFOs by 50%.
• Increased Alenium / Alloys gained from Alien Base missions by roughly 100%.
• Warden Armour now requires 6 Alloys to build (up from 4).
• Accelerated Weapons now require more Alloys to build, with the most expensive weapons requiring 6 (up from 4).
• Laser weapons now require more Alloys and Alenium to build, with the most expensive requiring 6 of each (up from 4).
• Swapped the Alloys and Alenium cost of advanced building upgrades; these generally now require twice as much Alenium as they do Alloys.
• Construction time of Radar Array reduced from 20 days to 15 days.
• Training Center building increased in cost from $250k to $350k.
• Doubled the duration of Corpse Analysis II engineering projects.

Tactical Combat balancing:

• It is no longer possible to see doors opening or closing under the fog of war, as this made the position of alien units very obvious. These doors will now only visually update when one of your units sees them.
• Sectons now trigger their Psionic Triangulation accuracy bonus from being near Psyons, not by being near other Sectons. However, if the Psyon is killed (and no other Psyon is nearby) the Secton will now immediately panic and lose all remaining TU.
• Using a healing item will no longer trigger enemy reaction fire.
• Medikit weight increased to 25 (from 15).
• Reaper Zombies now have 70HP (up from 40HP).
• Mentarch can no longer crouch or be suppressed.
• Slight Accuracy reduction on MARS Cannon weapons.
• Alien melee weapons can no longer gib units through overdamage.
• Enabled reaction fire on the various alien melee weapons (mantids, sebillians, reapers, mentarch, zombies).

Air Combat balancing:

• Alien missiles in the air combat now have a 0.35x damage against units that can do evasive roll; this means alien Fighters and alien Interceptors are now a bit weaker when autoresolving air combat battles.
• Reduced construction cost of missiles / torpedoes by 20%
• Reduced upkeep for Angel from $100k to $75k per month
• Reduced upkeep for Phantom from $150k to $120k per month
• Bomber UFO weapons updated. The main cannon now fires faster and destroys armour more quickly, and the secondary weapon now has a much smaller fire arc but can rotate to cover the rear and sides (but not the front) of the UFO. Unescorted Bombers are therefore now weaker against agile planes like the Phantom, but keeping away from the rotating turret can be more challenging if there are escort UFOs present.
• Destroyer UFO increased to 200HP (from 175).
• Fighter UFO turn rate increased by 50%.
• Fighter Cannon armour destruction increased to 2-5 (from 0-3).
• Abductor UFO increased to 275HP (from 250).
• Abductor Cannon range increased by 10%, armour destruction increased from 1-3 to 3-5, and reload time reduced from 0.75 sec to 0.5 sec. Projectile speed slowed down by 33%.
• Alien Interceptor Missiles armour destruction increased to 3-7 (from 0-4).

MINOR GAMEPLAY / CONTENT CHANGES:

• Added a number of new maps for Terror Sites / ATLAS Base / Cleaner Data Raid / Convoy Ambush / Rescue VIP missions.
• Added new 3D models for the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle, Accelerated Shotgun, Accelerated LMG, Alloy Shield, Stun Gun and Stun Baton.
• Added new 2D inventory tile art for the melee knife and the HEVY Smoke Rounds.
• Added Fusion weapons to the game. For any Kickstarter backers who saw the old incarnation of these weapons, we've updated the designs of the Shotgun and LMG and also given each weapon a unique ammo battery design.
• Added proper melee animations for the Mantid and Sebillian units.
• Units now play an injury sound and injury animation when struck with a stun weapon that does not inflict damage.
• Soldiers should now hide their carried weapon when performing their ladder climb animation.
• It is now possible to use any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters in soldier / aircraft / base names.
• Moved a check that was preventing a player launching an empty dropship from the Launch Aircraft screen to the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen instead (i.e. after you've had a chance to fill the dropship with soldiers).
• Stopping chance 0% objects are no longer highlighted on the fire path.
• Added a basic sort order system to the soldier loadout profiles.
• Units that can crush terrain now do not crush an open double door when they pass through it (most noticable inside UFOs and in Alien Base missions).
• The MARS now shows a custom "cannot interact" cursor when hovering over a mission objective item (like a computer desk) that soldiers can interact with but vehicles cannot.
• Double clicking an empty slot on the Soldier Equip screen will bring up the soldier assignment menu directly, so you don't need to select the slot and click the button any more.
• Clicking a weapon in the soldier inventory on the Soldier Equip screen will select it in the Armory, allowing you to add more ammo quickly (let us know if this ends up being annoying).
• Set the large rock mesas in the Polar and Desert maps to be significantly tougher, and added proper destruction states to the Polar one.
• Updated the Soldier Equip screen so items in the inventory and in the base armory panel now both have a slight highlight on mouse hover.
• There's now a small animation when soldier pawns switch places in the dropship (on the Aircraft screen), which makes it easier to understand what's happening.
• Added tooltip description text to the Stalker Armour and Exosuit Armour.
• Improved the performance for the Farm cabbage fields, as some players were experiencing FPS drops there.
• Updated the sort order on several items in the soldier armory and in the base stores so things are grouped more sensibly.
• Abduction tubes and the various Stealth unit shaders (Wraiths / Stealthsuit) no longer draw under the shroud.
• Security guards in the dockyards now have little hats so they don't look quite so much like Cleaners.

BUGFIXES:

• Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to run a building upgrade project when having a large number of buildings (most commonly occurred with the Gauss Battery Upgrade project).
• Fixed a bug where the text on UFO information pop-ups was not being displayed for users playing in Chinese / Japanese / Korean.
• Fixed a bug where Unassigned soldiers are not showing certain items on their paperdoll image on the Soldier Equip screen (jetpacks, MARS weapons, etc).
• Fixed soldiers sometimes not being removed from the dropship even when reduced to below 50% HP.
• Fixed a bug where the Autofill Dropship button on the Soldier Equip screen could bypass the dropship vehicle limit.
• Fixed reloading a weapon in the tactical inventory not playing the reload sound.
• Fixed the tactical camera getting stuck at a weird angle if you were halfway through rotating it and something else tried to take control of the camera (sighting an enemy, etc).
• Fixed a bug where Senty Guns were incorrectly showing on the Soldier Equip screen in secondary bases (they should only appear before Base Defence missions, as that's the only time they can be used).
• Fixed a bug where the soldier paperdoll could get blurred if a certain combination of items were equipped.
• Fixed a bug where the soldier portrait could disappear on the dropship soldier arrangement screen.
• Fixed the Autofill Drosphip button not appearing immediately if you used RMB to unassign a soldier from a full dropship.
• Fixed the bug where grenades could get stuck displaying a 0% hit chance.
• Fixed a bug where units could stand in mid-air at the top of a ladder.
• Fixed a bug where you could place two soldiers into the same destination tile if one of them was using a jetpack.
• Fixed a bug where unconscious units could not be revived with a medikit,
• Fixed a bug where the shoot/move preview hit calculations was not accurately updating the value for Wraith Cloaking Field based on the new soldier location being previewed.
• Fixed a bug where TU values could end up with a decimal point after a Berserk action.
• Fixed a bug where suppressing an enemy unit with reaction fire would not stop them finishing their planned movement.
• Fixed a bug where crouching during the pre-battle deployment phase on cerrtain missions cost TU, and did not refund it if you stood up.
• Fixed a bug where the crouch keyboard shortcut ("C") did not work during the pre-battle deployment phase.
• Fixed a bug where the combat shield was not disappearing after being destroyed.
• Fixed a bug where certain weapons could not be picked up from the ground after being dropped.
• Fixed certain objective items (mostly the computer desks) being incorrectly rotated in some situations.
• Fixed the Bleeding Wounds counter being displayed vertically if the unit has more than 10 Bleeding Wounds.
• Fixed the open door mouse cursor remaining active on the menu if you press Esc while hovering over a door.
• Fixed a visual issue where the green deployment area tiles could sometimes remain after the end of the deployment phase.
• Fixed throwing a grenade / flare onto the roof of a building causing windows on the floor below to shatter.
• Fixed some visual issues with the restaurant sign in the Western Town terror maps.
• Fixed a number of bugs with the Ultimate Power achievement (bring all Colonels to a mission).
• Fixed a few types of aliens not correctly showing the red obstruction shading when they are hidden behind an object.
• Fixed a minor issue with fire paths where shooting round corners was more permissive if you were shooting through an adjacent unit.
• Fixed a typo in the Electroshock Pistol name.
• Removed some incorrect tooltips from the Mod Manager panel.

 

[Socrates]

How does Xenonauts hold up to something like UFO Defense or XCOM 2

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Nothing will look good in comparison to UFO: Enemy Unknown or XCOM: Terror from the Deep. Xenonauts is an OK attempt at doing a spiritual successor to the original games and its miles ahead of the nu-XCOM stuff.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

How does Xenonauts hold up to something like UFO Defense

the suppression system is absolutely lovely and i demand it to be implemented in every game with guns. that's it. everything else goes from "worse" to "why the hell did you change that?".

 

[Average Manatee]

How does Xenonauts 2 compare to Xenonauts 1 at this point? Has enough improved?

 

[Serus]

Nothing will look good in comparison to UFO: Enemy Unknown or XCOM: Terror from the Deep. Xenonauts is an OK attempt at doing a spiritual successor to the original games and its miles ahead of the nu-XCOM stuff.

Nu-XCOM stuff can be decent if done right. It's just that the original Firaxis game(s) is not very good. OTOH "Long War" was one of the best tactical alien bashing experience i ever got, only surpassed by original X-Com, and even that, not in all areas.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Milestone 4 Released! (v4.12.0)
Our Milestone 4 update to Xenonauts 2 has now officially been released! This update will break existing saved games, but if you want to keep playing your existing campaigns please switch to our Legacy branches where Milestone 3 is still available (instructions on how to do so here[www.goldhawkinteractive.com]).

We will be monitoring bug reports closely over the next couple of weeks, and we'll investigate and hotfix any issues raised by the community - so please do report any bugs you encounter!

Developer Commentary & Key Changes
This update is a big one - it adds a new UFO, a new alien race, a new suit of Xenonaut soldier armour, many new maps, and probably the largest update to the game balance since the game released. It is still not yet possible to complete the campaign (that's planned for Milestone 5), but the game now contains every UFO type except for the Battleship!

Please let us know what you think about the game balance in Milestone 4 in the dedicated Milestone 4 Balance & Feedback thread, as we'll be considering community feedback while we work on Milestone 5!

Harvester UFO
The Harvester is the sixth largest of the seven UFO types that can create Crash Sites, with only the Battleship (which is arriving in Milestone 5) being larger and more powerful. It is primarily a transport craft that replaces the Abductor UFO on most mission types, but in addition to the normal beam weapons it also fires homing missiles similar to those used by the Observer UFO.

In the tactical combat it has two interior variants and can hold a sizeable crew of well-equipped elite aliens.

Androns
Androns are robotic alien soldiers with a lot of Armour but average Hit Points that accompany Wraith crews on Terror Sites and on Abductor-class UFOs and above. Although they are extremely tough, they are vulnerable to EMP damage or anything that can break their armour.

Androns were in some of the (pre-Early Access) Kickstarter builds of Xenonauts 2, but their original models / animations didn't look particularly good and they had integrated arm-cannon weapons that were difficult for players to identify. We're much happier with the updated models and animations, and since the new Androns carry weapons in the conventional manner it's now much easier to spot which ones have deadly Fusion weapons!

Colossus Battlesuit
The Colossus Battlesuit was originally intended to be the "ultimate" Xenonaut soldier armour, but we subsequently decided it would be better to swap it with the Exosuit (which has now been renamed the Vanguard Battlesuit). The hulking Colossus is therefore the first (and most primitive) iteration of battlesuit technology, offering excellent protection but suffering from several major limitations that do not affect the more advanced Vanguard.

In gameplay terms, the Colossus offers very high Armour and grants the user 100 Strength, but reduces the wearer's Vision Range by -3 tiles and their Reflexes by -20. It is also only able to wield Machine Gun-type weapons, and cannot use grenades or equip modules.

When the Vanguard becomes available, the Colossus can be upgraded in the Workshop to further improve its Armour. The idea is that a handful of Colossus suits could remain viable in the final stage of the game, where they can be used as specialised heavy assault units.
Game Rebalance
We've completely rebalanced the strategy layer and the UFO crews for Milestone 4 to address community feedback.

There were frequent complaints that Milestone 3 was too stingy with funding once you got past the midpoint of the campaign, making it difficult to build the advanced interceptors required to defend the world. This should now be fixed, and funding is now once again linked to regional Panic - but most events that affect Panic (both positively and negatively) now also have a small global effect on Panic. This means Panic will not rise so quickly in undefended regions if you are doing a good job of protecting other parts of the world.

We've also smoothed out the difficulty curve for both the air combat and the tactical combat, as there were several spots where it could feel rather unfair. To maintain the challenge in the later stages of the campaign, we've rebalanced the alien mission crews and added more powerful "heavy" variants of several existing units like the Mentarch, Servitor and Cyberdrone.

You can see from the full changelogs below that we've changed a LOT of things - in general, we think Milestone 4 should be a better balanced and more enjoyable player experience than previous version of the game were!

BALANCE CHANGES:
Strategy:

• Added Harvester UFO.
• Added Colossus Battlesuit soldier armour. This offers excellent protection, 100 Strength, and the ability to smash through walls like a vehicle. However, it also reduces the wearer's Reflexes and Vision Range, and can only wield certain weapons.
• Added Sentinel Module, which grants soldiers 180-degree vision cones.
• Added Reinforced Shield, which is the final upgrade for the Combat Shield and Assault Shield.
• Added Energy Knife weapon, which is an upgraded version of the Combat Knife.
• Added new Corpse Analysis engineering projects for the Servitor, Cyberdrone and Andron enemies.
• 50% of your funding is now modified by the Panic score in local regions, and shooting down UFOs now grants a small global Panic reduction in addition to the larger local Panic reduction. This restores the link between funding and managing Panic levels, but ensures you do not need to immediately rush interceptor coverage across the whole globe on higher difficulty settings.
• The invasion has been tweaked so that the player needs to run fewer missions in the first couple of months of the campaign. The appearance of Scout UFOs and Destroyer UFOs has been moved forward slightly, and the Cleaner Base is discovered a little later. This means the time spent using each tech tier of equipment is spread more evenly.
• Base structures are now more expensive in general, and the Medical Center and Training Room are now much more expensive.
• Aircraft now take longer to build and are more expensive, and have reduced fuel range on the Geoscape. However, their equipment is cheaper (see below) and they now refund 50% of their construction cost when sold.
• Aircraft equipment is no longer individually constructed in the workshop. Starting equipment and weapons are unlimited quantity, and these can be globally upgraded to higher tiers via engineering projects.
• Two additional placeholder plot objectives added to the campaign: capture an alien officer, and capture an alien leader. These will be replaced in Milestone 5, but for now they just increase monthly funding when completed.
• You no longer pay upkeep costs on aircraft that are still under construction, or queued in the engineering project list.

Air Combat:

• We've tweaked the stats of several UFOs downwards to account for the fact they appear a little earlier in the game.
• Hunter-Killer missiles on the Observer and Abductor now inflict less damage, and are slightly less maneuverable.
• The difficulty modifier (set on the Campaign Settings) was previously broken, but will now correctly increase / decrease the damage inflicted by UFO weapons.
• Fixed a bug where the autoresolved air combat was previously still using the UFO HP / Armour modifiers based on the number of interceptors used (making UFOs easier if you had 1 plane, and harder if you had 3).

Tactical Combat:

• Added new Andron alien units, plus more powerful variants of existing units in the later stages of the campaign (Heavy Mentarch, Heavy Servitor, Heavy Cyberdrone, and Reaper Alpha).
• Melee weapons no longer have a 100% hit chance against aliens. The base hit chance of melee weapons is about 60%, and this is increased or decreased based on the difference between the attacker's Reflexes and defender's Reflexes (so the hit chance against inanimate objects remains 100%). Additionally, performing melee attacks on hostile targets now grants progress points towards increasing Reflexes.
• You can no longer heal enemy units, as this allowed players to get into several potential crash situations. As they cannot be healed, unconscious aliens no longer suffer damage from any Bleeding Wounds they have prior to being stunned.
• The civilian / local forces turn now occurs before the alien turn, which means it's now possible for the local forces to heroically save your troops from being killed by aliens.
• Stunned Xenonaut soldiers equipped with an Automed Unit will now automatically revive themselves when it triggers at end of turn.
• MARS and other robotic units no longer suffer Accuracy reduction due to injury.
• ARES now has 100HP instead of 80HP. This means it has the same base HP value as the MARS, but it has stronger armour which makes it tougher overall.
• Various updates made to the alien invasion:
  • The aliens in each UFOs / ground missions have been updated to improve consistency. There are now three main alien races (Psyons, Sebillians, Wraiths) with different supporting units for each species - although in Alien Base missions you can encounter enemies of any type.
  • Abduction missions now contain Cleaners as well as aliens until the Cleaner HQ is destroyed. The number of aliens is reduced if Cleaners are present, but overall the missions get slightly easier once the Cleaner HQ is destroyed.
  • The aliens in the Cleaner HQ mission no longer have Plasma weapons unless it's past day 120, as this was unlocking the corresponding tech earlier than expected.
• Various updates made to weapons and armour:
  • Stalker Armour cloaking field defensive bonus reduced from -2 Accuracy to -1.5 Accuracy per tile.
  • Non-sniper weapons now generate a bit more of their hit chance from proximity, meaning they have a higher hit chance at close range (generally about +10%) but a lower hit chance at long range.
  • Pistol - range reduced from 12 tiles to 10 tiles but short range bonus increased from 2.25% to 4%, and accuracy multiplier reduced by 5% on each fire mode. Overall this makes the pistol more deadly, but at the cost of 2 tiles of range.
  • Shotgun - range reduced from 10 tiles to 9 tiles but short range bonus increased from 6.25% per tile to 7.5% per tile. Slight nerf to firing costs, which have increased to 30% and 43% (from 28% and 40%).
  • Rifle - increased short range bonus by 0.5% per tile for 20 tiles, decreased Accuracy multiplier by 5% on each fire mode.
  • Machineguns- significantly buffed as they no longer lose Accuracy after the soldier has moved for the first time each turn. Same changes to short range bonus vs Accuracy multiplier as the Rifle.
  • Sniper Rifle - this weapon has not changed.
  • HEVY Launcher - this weapon has been significantly buffed. It is now an arc-fire weapon rather than a direct-fire weapon and now has a maximum range of 25 tiles, which makes it significantly stronger (unless you're indoors where the ceiling limits the range). The scattering on missed shots has been updated to ensure they don't always catch the target in the blast area, but it's still much more likely to happen than when it was a direct-fire weapon.
  • Combat Knife - increased damage by 10%, and reduced its weight so it is no longer heavier than the pistol.
  • Stun Gun - reduced the suppression to 15 (from 23)
• Various updates made to specific aliens:
  • Androns have been added to the game. These formidable robotic alien soldiers have very high armour but relatively low HP, cannot be suppressed, and appear as support units for Wraiths on Terror missions and inside larger UFOs.
  • Wraith "Cloaking Field" ability now reduces the shooter's Accuracy, rather than inflicting a flat penalty on overall Hit Chance. This means Hit Chance gained from proximity is unaffected by Cloaking Field, and weapons with a naturally low hit chance per shot (e.g. machineguns) are no longer disproportionately affected compared to single-shot weapon types.
  • Wraith HP values have been reduced by 20%.
  • Sebillian Time Units increased to 75 (from 60), and Reflexes increased to 50 (from 25).
  • Psyon Officers and Psyon Leaders are now equipped with a Psi-Amp weapon, which acts like a Plasma Pistol Pistol but completely ignores armour. We'll likely expand this in Milestone 5 so Bravery or Morale offer some kind of defence against it.
• Various updates made to specific missions, generally to improve the rewards offered or make time limits a bit less punishing:
  • Alien Base missions are now always treated as night missions.
  • The spawn regions on Ambush missions have been reduced by 3 tiles, so you can't spawn quite as close to the Cleaner convoy.
  • The soldiers you are rescuing in the Rescue Soldier missions are now each also carrying a Briefcase of Money item (value: $50,000).
  • All Abduction missions now have a base duration of 7 turns (the first mission previously had 6, all others had 8)
  • Eliminate VIP missions now have 2 turns longer before enemy reinforcements arrive, and they now give a $200k rewards for victory.
  • VIP Extraction missions now have 1 turn longer before enemy reinforcements arrive, and have 1 fewer enemy. They also now give a $200k reward for victory.
  • Cleaner Base mission now awards 50 Alloys and 50 Alenium on completion.
  • Cleaner reinforcements now spawn with 50% Time Units, instead of zero Time Units.
  • Cleaner reinforcements now escalate more quickly, with subsequent waves of reinforcements coming 3 turns after the first reinforcements and having twice as many enemies (this is to discourage people from spawn camping them).

GAMEPLAY / CONTENT CHANGES:
Strategy:

• General: Added a new "bug reporter" tool which you can access by pressing F11. This will create a .zip file which contains all recent logs and saves, and can easily be attached to any bug report on the Discord or our forums to ensure we have all the information we need to find the issue.
• General: Added a small checkbox on the tactical mission loading screen that sets the game to auto-launch into the tactical combat once loading is complete (rather than waiting for you to press Begin Mission). The checkbox setting is persistent between missions.
• General: Added a significant number of new sound effects to various parts of the strategy layer.
• General: Added art for the Probe UFO and Nanofabrication research projects.
• General: Added a black background to the strategy UI that will be revealed if people play on ultra-ultra-widescreen monitors (i.e. anything more than 21:9 aspect ratio).
• Geoscape: Funding Report expanded to show the "base funding" value for each region, plus the funding modifier driven by the Panic level in that region. Any missions / research projects that increase monthly funding now list values as increases in terms of base funding (the amount you'll actually get at month end varies based on the Panic in each region).
• Geoscape: After completing a Corpse Analysis engineering project which unlocks further engineering projects, the popup now offers to take you to the Engineering screen rather than the Research screen.
• Geoscape: Added a kill count for each soldier on the post-mission debrief screen (each kill shown as an alien skull)
• Base: Added the building tooltip to the constructable buildings list.
• Base: The Training Rate value now shows decimals where appropriate, as each Interrogation increases the rate by 0.5.
• Base Stores: Alien Psi-Amp, Alien Grenades and Alien Advanced Grenades are now marked as Junk item for sale purposes.
• Research: Fixed the Xenopedia entry for the Scout UFO incorrectly reporting it was Evasive.
• Aircraft: The generic soldier icons on the dropship soldier arrangement screen have now been replaced by soldier role icons, which should make it much easier to tell your soldiers apart.
• Aircraft: Increased the size of the aircraft hardpoint equipment menu so you can see more available items at once.
• Aircraft: When viewing a dropship, the soldier list now increases in size as the dropship capacity increases (rather than a scrollbar being added).
• Aircraft: The "Choose Aircraft Name" panel now has a cancel button, and can be closed by pressing Esc.
• Aircraft: Updated the tooltip on button confirming aircraft relocation.
• Soldier Equip: Injured soldiers and wounded soldiers now use different colours, making the two states easier to distinguish between.
• Soldier Equip: Right-clicking a soldier in the Unassigned soldier list will now automatically assign them to an available slot in the dropship (i.e. the inverse of the right-click fast unassignment you can do on the list of soldiers assigned to a dropship).
• Soldier Equip: Updated the tooltip on the Select Soldier button shown on empty dropship slots.
• Soldier Equip: Fixed the Vanguard (Exosuit) light / heavy armour paperdoll variants not being consistently positioned.
• Soldier Equip: The "War Machine" achievement now unlocks from equipping the Vanguard Battlesuit rather than the Colossus.
• Soldier Equip: When players attempt a second mission without the dropship first returning to base, surviving soldiers receive equipment using the round robin method (assuming there is not enough to go around). Previously the first soldier would take all items set in their loadout, then the second would take all the items in their loadout, etc - which would cause problems if there wasn't enough items to go around (e.g. the first soldier would be issued mulitiple ammo magazines, but the last soldier wouldn't even get one to load into their weapon).
• Soldier Equip: Several updates to make soldier planned loadouts (i.e. the loadouts of soldiers that aren't in the dropship) more intuitive and useful:
• A pop-up message is now generated if you assign new soldiers to the dropship and the base stores does not have enough items to fill their planned loadout (which leads to soldiers not having some items equipped).
• Item quantities on the Soldier Equip screen now display as "X / Y" where X is the number currently in the base stores, and Y is the total number you own (including any equipped on your soldiers).
• You can now drag items into planned loadouts even if the base stores contains 0 of those items.

Air Combat:

• Tthe first interceptor is now automatically selected when you begin a battle.
• The rotation arc for UFO weapons that are capable of rotating is now displayed.
• Hovering over either Evasive Roll button now displays a "ghost" plane that shows where the interceptor will end up.
• Different UFOs / aircraft may now have different cooldowns for evasive roll.
• The sizes of UFOs in the air combat has been updated to improve their relative scale.

Tactical Combat:

• Almost 40 new maps have been added to the game (~30x Harvester Crash Site maps, 5x Alien Base maps, 1x Cleaner Base map, 1x Cleaner Data Raid)
• Further improvements have been made to the AI. Additionally, armed civilians should no longer be interested in going inside UFOs.
• Disabled various doors from autoclosing (UFO doors, alien base doors, blast doors in Xenonaut / Cleaner bases) as a temporary fix for the issue where the visual open / closed state of doors gets out of sync with their actual open / closed state.
• Cover objects with walkable floor tiles on top (shipping containers, caravans, buses, etc) are now linked in terms of destruction, which means destroying the object will remove the walkable tiles. Units stood on these tiles will fall to the ground.
• The Toggle Roof button is now functional and the visual behaviour of roofs has changed. Now roofs are shown by default, and will hide automatically when a soldier gains vision over any tile inside the building (previously roofs would always be hidden if you had the camera at level 1). After clicking the Toggle Roof button, the roof visibility will be forced on.
• Updated the way mouse targeting works when units are on top of objects that you cannot go inside (e.g. cliffs, shipping containers) so that you don't have to move the camera up to their level to click on them.
• Updated the camera behaviour when enemy reinforcements arrive - it now scrolls through any newly spawned enemy units.
• Updated the camera behaviour at end of turn when bleeding wounds, regeneration or the Automed Unit is being used - the camera will now scroll through all affected units in turn and show any healing or damage effects.
• When in grenade / medikit targeting mode, the game will no longer preview the portrait / stats of other soldiers when you hover over their minitabs at the top of the screen (because doing this cancelled the grenade / medikit use).
• Soldiers marked as "done" for the turn in the tactical combat now have a green tick below their minitab.
• The minimum hit chance required for units to perform overwatch is now 10% and soldiers will not fire their weapons at targets beyond the maximum range of their weapon (which would inflict reduced damage).
• Improved the auto-pathing when using a melee / heal item on a target several tiles away, so it correctly finds the shortest path and doesn't get confused by intervening walls.
• Improved the path prediction code to prevent situations where the move path would show soldiers being able to move a shorter distance than they were actually able to.
• Abduction tubes now play the teleport animation and teleport sound when they disappear midway through an Abduction mission due to the timer expiring.
• Climbing a ladder now plays footstep sounds.
• Melee attacks now occur more quickly after the player clicks the attack button.
• Sped up Mentarch firing animation.
• The Valkyrie dropship now has side doors which automatically open as units pass through them (this does not cost TU). As they have windows, they do not block vision - but they do stop alien reaction fire hitting soldiers still inside the dropship!
• Stopped open Xenonaut Base / ATLAS Base blast doors triggering the shut door icon, which blocks other click commands.
• All walls within the Abductor UFO are now destructible.
• Optimised the cabbage fields in the Farm maps
• Various small visual updates:
  • Updated 3d models for the basic Secton and Wraith aliens, and new models for the human Fusion Pistol, Fusion Shotgun and Fusion Sniper Rifle.
  • Updated environment art for the command room in the ATLAS Base mission, adding a proper command table and wall screens that better resemble those on the main menu artwork.
  • Updated the art on the Fusion Charge so it glows fusion green rather than plasma blue.
  • Slightly updated the Gauss Shotgun art so it's easier to differentiate at a glance from the Gauss Rifle.
  • Retextured all the various roller doors in the game, and removed all the static roller doors in the Western Town and replaced them with roller doors that can be opened.
  • Fixed z-fighting issues with some of the ATLAS base corridor tiles and the fog of war shader.
  • Fixed some alignment issues for the wall corner tiles in the Xenonaut Base / ATLAS Base map
  • Fixed a visual issue on one of the Western Town petrol station buildings

BUGFIXES:
Strategy:

• Geoscape: Fixed the mission information UI incorrectly displaying some dummy information if you have built a Quantum Array.
• Geoscape: Fixed an issue where redirecting an aircraft in flight would not spawn the multi-select box if you clicked a target in close proximity to another possible target.
• Geoscape: Fixed some issues to do with the UFO take-off process that should help avoid the situation where a UFO spends days flying around the map while repeatedly taking off and landing.
• Geoscape: Aircraft icon no longer disappears if aircraft circumnavigates the map more than once in a single direction
• Geoscape: Fixed clicking-and-holding to move map while in base construction mode acting placing the base when you release the mouse.
• Geoscape: Fixed the nightshadow not extending all the way to the bottom of the map.
• Geoscape: Destroyed Xenonaut bases no longer prevent the player building another base nearby.
• Research: Fixed in-progress research projects not showing a duration if the remaining time was between 23 and 24 hours.
• Base Stores: Fixed pressing Esc on the Transfer Items screen not returning to the Geoscape like it does on other strategy UI screens.
• Soldiers: Fixed there being spots in the Soldier list where the mouse scrollwheel would not allow you to scroll the list.
• Soldier Equip: Guardian "Heavy Armour" module now correctly remembers whether it was enabled or disabled when changing armour (like the heavy armour modules for other armours do).
• Soldier Equip: Fixed wounded soldiers in the dropship visually having no armour while travelling back to base.
• Soldier Equip: Fixed the flicker that would occur in the bottom left list before you access the screen for the first time.
• Soldier Equip: Fixed this screen starting with the the Equipment tab selected in the Armory, not the Weapons tab.
• Soldier Equip: Fixed custom loadout names not having a maximum length (now limited to 20 characters).
• Soldier Equip: Fixed players being unable to save loadout changes if all they changed was toggling the Heavy Armour toggle on / off.
• Aircraft: Fixed the soldier HP bar that is shown on hover on the Dropship soldier arrangement screen showing inconsistent values when you switch between soldiers.
• Aircraft: Fixed the inverted keybinds when scrolling through different aircraft.
• Aircraft: Fixed a bug where the topbar would be hidden if you built a new base and then went directly to the Aircraft screen.
• Misc: Fixed a few strings that were not being correctly translated.

Air Combat:

• Fixed a crash in the air combat that could occur if you accidentally right-clicked on one of the Evasive Roll buttons.
• Fixed the air combat maps sometimes containing aircraft deployment regions that don't disappear when the battle begins.
• Fixed the Air Superiority achievement not unlocking correctly if you were using air combat autoresolve.

Tactical Combat:

• Fixed grenades sometimes not inflicting any damage on terrain when they hit the middle of a large object (such as a clump of trees).
• Fixed an issue where the you would get vision into the UFO at the start of the turn if the door had started open, even though it then automatically closed itself.
• Fixed the Western Town restaurant interior walls appearing black on some systems.
• Fixed the adjacent cover system not correctly disallowing other adjacent cover of similar stopping value.
• Fixed unconscious civilians / local forces being treated as dead in the mission debrief.
• Fixed unconscious soldiers with bleeding wounds not taking bleed damage.
• Prevented the player from healing an unconscious unit if there is another unit stood on their tile, as that would lead to two units occupying the same tile.
• Fixed another example of soldiers being able to occupy the same tile and get stuck inside each other.
• Fixed an AI issue with Reapers preventing them from attacking in some circumstances.
• Wraith active camo ability is no longer reset to being active when loading a saved game.
• Secton Psionic Triangulation glowing eyes can no longer be seen in the shroud in some circumstances.
• Secton Psionic triangulation no longer incorrectly triggers off other Sectons in some circumstances.
• Fixed Psyon Mesmerize incorrectly triggering if a shot misses, hits an explosive object and kills the Psyon.
• Fixed some mission types not generating autosaves on the first turn.
• Fixed an AI hang that could occur when an alien unit capable of crushing walls encounters a unit on the other side of the wall
• Fixed an issue where zooming in / out using the keyboard keys could be too fast if you held down the keys.
• Fixed some ladders on some of the new Polar maps not being climbable.
• Fixed the unpathable cliffs on the Polar extraction / ambush maps.
• Fixed some misaligned road tiles in one of the Cleaner Data Raid missions.
• Fixed several issues with the Ambush mission trucks having incorrect loot amounts in certain maps.
• Fixed the large 4x2 oiltank not being correctly removed when destroyed.
• Fixed being able to see dead bodies inside the crashed UFO in the shroud before the UFO itself becomes visible.
• Fixed the abduction tubes on Abduction missions being visible in the shroud.
• Fixed TU reserve mode being left enabled on a weapon after a panicking soldier drops it
• Fixed TU reserve mode being visually disabled after enemy overwatch occurs
• Fixed an issue where a teleporter doesn't trigger due to enemy reaction fire occuring as a unit steps onto a teleporter, but the camera still moved up to the higher level as if it had.
• Fixed an issue where recovering the body of a dead soldier wouldn't also recover the equipped armour on that body (this only applies on lower difficulty settings where armour is not destroyed on death).
• Fixed the Cleaner reinforcements coming one turn too early for the linked conversation on the Cleaner Data Raid missions.
• Fixed an issue where the three "On Mission" soldiers would get permanently stuck in the dropship after returning to base if you flew to a Soldier Extraction mission site, then aborted the mission and returned to base.
• Fixed the camera panning from the dropship objective to the spawn position of your squad on VIP extraction missions also incorrectly happening after loading a save game.
• Fixed instances where units suffering TU penalties due to insufficient carrying capacity would also have their weapon TU fire costs reduced.
• Fixed pressing Esc while hovering over an enemy in tactical combat not opening the game menu.
• Fixed missions incorrectly ending immediately when spawned enemies still remain alive (e.g. Reapers spawned from Zombies).
• Fixed some flickering on the Cruiser UFO's hull dropshadow.
• Fixed an issue with the landed Abductor hull that allowed you to see through the hull and reveal the interior from certain angles.
• Fixed zombified civilians / local forces soldiers not using the zombie animations.
• Fixed the damaged particles on the yellow power generators displaying strange visual effects when targeted.
• Fixed abduction tubes continuing to play their humming sound even if they had teleported away due to the mission timer expiring.
• Fixed freed civilians on Abduction missions not being counted in the post-mission Debrief line about surviving civilians.
• Fixed VIPs being given flares in night missions.
• Fixed the teleport animation being visually stretched.

 

[ropetight]

It is great that Xenonauts 2 is advancing, even though it will not be what was promised.
Changelog really shows they scrapped 90% of what they made preceding the Early Access, which is a shame.
Is it worth trying after this milestone?

 

[Alienman]

I would say wait. Not because the game is bad, I really enjoy it. But in its current state, it's short. Everything progresses way too quickly. Not to shill too much, but if you go to my site, click the "The X-com genre" tab at the top you can follow my impressions of Xenonauts 2. From milestone 1 to 4.

Many of the issues I had initially have been fixed, however, as said, the progression is lightning speed currently. You get maybe 1, or 2 UFOs of each tier at most, and the same seems to go for weapons before you unlock the next tier. It just doesn't feel epic enough.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
Hello everyone - hope you all had a good August. Here's our monthly update on what the team here at Goldhawk have been working on.

Programming
This month our technical director spent much of his month on honeymoon, and the rest of it fixing the trickier bugs discovered in Milestone 4 by the community. Our other senior programmer split his time between bugfixes and working on our updated internal game editor (mentioned in last month's update), which meant we only had one programmer available to work on feature implementation.

Aside from the weekly stability fixes we've released for Milestone 4 and various small usability changes / AI improvements, we added a few useful gameplay features to our upcoming Milestone 5 update. One was a much-requested update to the item sale price system, allowing sale prices to slowly regain lost value as time passes, and another was expanded options for "difficult terrain" which makes it more costly for soldiers (but not vehicles) to walk through and crush plants like hay. This may allow things such as shallow water that can be waded through on the Jungle maps, making the different biomes a bit more distinct from one another.

Invasion Phases
I've spent a lot of time this month on the new "Invasion Phase" system. This divides the alien invasion into five escalating phases, with a narrative event and some artwork and a short conversation with the Operations Director and Chief Scientist at the start of each one.

The goal here is to tie the lore together and explain how the invasion is escalating, what the aliens are doing differently and how the world is reacting to it. It also allows us to more clearly explain the shifting role of the Xenonauts throughout the conflict, starting as an clandestine organisation fighting a secret war against an unknown enemy and ending as an elite military organisation leading the fight against a full-scale alien invasion.

This coming month I'll be experimenting with several mechanical changes that we're hoping to tie to the Phase System, making the Geoscape mechanics a bit less static throughout the campaign. I'm quite excited about these, but I also don't want to talk about them yet in case I disappoint someone - they're still at the prototype phase, and could be changed or abandoned entirely based on playtesting. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this next month!

Other
Other areas of the game continued to progress over the past month. We partnered up with a couple of new illustrators, one of whom painted the new "Funding Report" artwork we've used as the cover art for this post, and the other is working on environment concepts for the tactical combat. We've also added lots of small things like some new 3D weapon models, some updated textures for certain alien combatants, and new tactical biome ambient sounds.

That's everything for this month - thanks for reading!

 

[Nirvash]

Can i still easy "clean" every ship bridge just by tossing inside a dozen gas granades?

 

[Alienman]

Can i still easy "clean" every ship bridge just by tossing inside a dozen gas granades?

They are supposed to avoid smoke, so probably not as easily.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

I'm kinda looking forward to playing this in 2031, when they finally manage to release the thing. Can't really think of a slower, more confused developer than Goldhawk.

Game is shaping to be pretty good, but over a decade of development and still not done, really?

 

[cyborgboy95]

Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
With September over it's once again time for our monthly Xenonauts 2 development update. Here's a quick rundown of the things we've been busy with this month!

Milestone 5
Although we've continued to release hotfixes for Milestone 4 this month, our focus has been Milestone 5. If all goes well, we should (hopefully) have an early prototype of this update ready for testers later this month.

Milestone 5 is taking a long time because we're making quite a few changes. Aside from the Phase system mentioned in the last update, we're also going to be testing a "strategic operations" system that gives the player more control over the Geoscape and opens up a greater number of strategic gameplay options.

Essentially, the player gets a certain amount of "operation points" each day that can be spent on one-off missions to provide benefits (e.g. lowering Panic in a region, gaining an immediate cash injection, etc) or can be used to recruit Supporters in Geoscape regions who provide passive bonuses (e.g. increased monthly funding, reduced research / engineering times, etc). If you recruit all the Supporters in a region, you also gain a powerful Region Bonus for your organisation.

Our goal for this system is to add a bit more strategic depth to the Geoscape, and provide players a way to reduce Panic in regions where they do not have aircraft or radar coverage. Choosing which types of Supporter and / or Region Bonuses players want to pursue should hopefully provide players some interesting strategic choices - we're looking forward to seeing what people think when they get to play it!

New Missions / Terrain Tiles
Milestone 5 is intended to include the complete sequence of story missions, allowing players to play the entire campaign from start to finish. We've therefore been working on the final mission, creating some unique terrain tiles to reflect the setting in which it takes place. Similarly, we've also created some unique tiles for the areas where the player will encounter the alien leader species, the Eternals (the bridges of Battleship UFOs, and the command centers of the largest alien bases).

We're also attempting to address feedback about mission variety becoming a bit stale towards the end of the game by adding two new story missions into the later stages of the campaign. These center around an orbital station the aliens have constructed high above Earth. This gives us an isolated environment where aliens outnumber humans, which is helpful because the presence of large numbers of enemy reinforcements means we can once again make use of some mission types that stopped making sense after the defeat of the Cleaners.

We're still experimenting with these missions, but again we're hoping to have a basic version of them in the Milestone 5 prototype.

Other Updates
We've also added various smaller systems to the game this month. Firstly, Xenonaut bases now cost varying amounts ($500k - $1.5m) depending on where they are placed. This means there's fewer places where placing a base is objectively a bad decision; the locations with optimal radar coverage are now also more expensive. It's worth bearing in mind this also affects the first base, meaning you'll have more starting funds available if you choose a cheaper location.

In the tactical combat, we've added support for alien weapons capable of spawning clouds of (poison) gas on impact. This should allow us to equip certain alien species (probably Mantids) with weapons that behave a little differently from other alien units, while also making items such as the Rebreather a bit more useful.

As you can see at the top of the screen, we've also continued to add new artwork to the game - the image above being tied to the Phase system and the updated storyline.

Updated Game Editor
Over the last couple of updates I've mentioned our Game Editor upgrade, which is the first step towards having working modding tools for Xenonauts 2. Although work on the final modding tools won't start until after Milestone 5 is complete, this editor upgrade is now largely complete and will act as the foundation for our mod tools.

That's it for now, I think - I had a few more smaller things I wanted to talk about, but this update has run long already so I'll leave it here. We'll post another development update once the Milestone 5 prototype is ready to play!

 

[cyborgboy95]

Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
Hello everyone - as we're now into the early days of November, it's time for an update on what we've been working on! The short answer is this: we made good progress in several areas last month, but frustratingly slow progress in one key area that has delayed the Milestone 5 prototype.

Milestone 5 / Strategic Improvements
Our main focus is still on getting the Milestone 5 prototype into a state where we can release it in beta for public testing. We were hoping that would happen last month, but we weren't able to make enough progress on the new strategy-layer mechanics. There were a few reasons for this, but the main one was that we continued to find new bugs that needed fixing after the Unity editor update mentioned in the previous update.

Thankfully, in the second half of the month we were able to better focus on implementing our new Supporter system. This system places four VIPs in each funding region who can be recruited as supporters by the Xenonauts to provide your organisation with a variety of strategic bonuses (more funding, faster research / engineering, etc.). Or they can be turned into panic-generating Infiltrators by the aliens. If you can recruit all of the supporters in each region, you also unlock a special regional bonus.

The Supporter system itself is now mostly functional, but we're still unsure how long it'll take us to connect it to the other game systems. For instance, the Doomsday Counter that is now active in the early stages of the game also ties into the Supporter system (with alien Infiltrators generating enemy Doomsday progress, and Xenonaut Supporters slowing it). We will also need to update the Infiltration UFO missions to turn neutral VIPs into Infiltrators if successful (where previously they simply generated Panic like other types of UFO mission), and so on.

Given what happened last month I'm not going to make any promises about when the Milestone 5 prototype will be ready - I'll just say we're working hard to get it into the hands of testers as quickly as possible.

New Missions
Milestone 5 adds new mission types - crash sites for the Battleship UFO, the two-part final mission (Operation ENDGAME), and two unique plot missions that take place on an alien orbital station (which appear around the point Cruiser UFOs start appearing).

The Battleship assets and crash site maps were completed some time ago, and this month we finished the final art assets and map setup for both halves of the Operation ENDGAME mission. The first mission on the alien orbital station is also at quite an advanced stage, with the custom art assets for that map now complete, but there's still further work to be done on the second orbital station mission.

Thankfully, this shouldn't cause delays - most of the remaining work is custom art assets, and we don't need the visuals to be final for the Milestone 5 prototype builds.

Alien Updates
Last month we added a new type of alien to the game, the Biter. These small insectoid aliens are more of a living weapon than a proper new species, as certain alien units can fire them towards enemy units - at which point they will charge towards nearby hostiles and try to bite them to death. Biters will expire within a few turns of spawning and have very low HP, but a pack of them can still pose a threat - particularly against units equipped with weapons that cost a lot of TU to fire (e.g. sniper rifles).

We also continued to make changes to our existing aliens to better differentiate them from one another. The main cannon on a Cyberdrone no longer acts like a giant plasma rifle, but is instead now a blast weapon that can inflict major damage across a large area (although it is now less likely to instantly kill a heavily-armoured soldier). We'll be finishing up some changes to the Mantid and Sebillian weapons this month too, which I'll explain in a future blog.

Illustrated UI Backgrounds
One of the coolest features in Xenonauts 1 was that the illustrated backgrounds of the strategic UI screens would upgrade as you progressed through the campaign, showing the way the new technological developments you had unlocked were changing your organisation. By the end of the game, characters had futuristic uniforms and the rooms were full of sci-fi equipment. Lots of players thought this really helped immerse them in the game.

Although implementing this in Xenonauts 2 involves repainting our existing (and perfectly fine) UI background art, we've decided the feature is cool enough that we've found some extra budget for it. Handily, the programming for this feature has already been finished, so as soon as the new artwork is done we can just slot it straight into the game. We started the sketch work for the new Research screen background last week, and hopefully you'll be able to see some results soon!

I'll leave the update there for this month - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have some good news on Milestone 5 in the coming weeks!

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Alien Updates
Last month we added a new type of alien to the game, the Biter. These small insectoid aliens are more of a living weapon than a proper new species, as certain alien units can fire them towards enemy units - at which point they will charge towards nearby hostiles and try to bite them to death. Biters will expire within a few turns of spawning and have very low HP, but a pack of them can still pose a threat - particularly against units equipped with weapons that cost a lot of TU to fire (e.g. sniper rifles).

They pretty much directly stole this from X-COM: Apocalypse