We've released the first version of Milestone 6 on our Experimental branch (instructions on how to access it here).
The usual disclaimers apply here - this is an experimental build, so it's likely to be unstable and may have balance issues. Because of the extra logging in experimental builds, it'll also have worse performance than standard builds. Additionally, not all of the planned Milestone 6 content is in place yet. If you're looking for a smooth and stable experience, it'd be better just to wait for the full Milestone 6 release!
KEY CONTENT:
Air Combat Revamp: we've given the visuals of the air combat minigame a major facelift, and made a number of small tweaks to the gameplay. Full details can be seen below.
Defender UFO: the Defender UFO is an alien escort craft with a more defensive configuration than the Fighter UFO. It is tougher and less agile but equipped with a powerful medium-range "missile shield" weapon that is capable of shooting down incoming missiles.
New 3D Models / Animations: this update contains new 3D models for all Sebillian units, the Cyberdrone and Heavy Cyberdrone, the Heavy Mentarch and Heavy Servitor. Many of these units also have new animations, and we've done quite a bit of work smoothing out the animations for many of these units - e.g. the Servitor used to have very inconsistent move speeds, and would pause for a long time before firing its weapon. While a few quirks may still remain, they should look much better than before!
New Environment Art: we've also added quite a few new assets to the tactical maps. Although the new Soviet Town biome isn't quite ready yet, this version already contains a number of new "industrial" Jungle biome maps, updates to the ATLAS Base and Cleaner Base objective rooms, and various new Farm tiles.
Translation Fixes: we spent a lot of time fixing up translation issues recently, so the localisation should be significantly improved. Please do report translation issues you encounter in these builds if you play in a non-English language!
Still in Progress:
Ending Cinematic: there's now a more polished ending sequence after you complete the final mission, but the "ending cinematic" is currently just a placeholder copy of the opening cinematic. We'll have the real thing finished before Milestone 6 hits public release.
Soviet Town Biome: the Soviet Town biome is an alternate biome for Terror maps. We're quite close to having the first batch of Soviet maps done and ready to add to the game, but we're not there yet.
Remaining Research Art: we already added several more pieces of research art to the game, but the final two illustrations (for Operation Endgame and the Biosurvey Array projects) are still in progress.
BALANCE CHANGES:
We've made some significant balance changes for Milestone 6, so I've added a bit of commentary here to explain our thought process!
The biggest change is that dropships now carry 8/10/12 soldiers (rather than 9/12/16), and the number of enemies has been reduced accordingly. We feel this makes the missions that do still support 16 soldiers (such as base defence missions and Operation ENDGAME) more special, while stopping the standard late-game missions becoming too slow and ponderous once you get the Pegasus.
We also think this improves the gameplay balance, as the Dragonfly in particular was a huge power spike in Milestone 5. As it arrives relatively early in the tech tree, getting 25% more soldiers (rather than 33%) seems more reasonable.
In general we were fairly happy with Phase 1 during our testing, as we felt it had good mission variety and felt quite intense. We did however decide to make the Doomsday counter more forgiving on the easier difficulty settings, as the passive daily Doomsday gain could be quite punishing if you didn't have a good understanding of the game mechanics.
The two biggest changes were to make the number of starting enemy Infiltrators dependent on the difficulty setting, and to set Elite Supporters to only generate +1 Doomsday per day if they are Infiltrators. We also did some more minor balancing work on the individual missions here, and added back the Rescue Soldiers mission that we had removed from Milestone 5.
We felt that Phase 2 was previously a bit anticlimactic - narratively the game was telling you the alien invasion had just begun, but the gameplay felt less intense than Phase 1. We've therefore equipped alien units with Plasma weapons instead of Magnetic weapons right from the start of Phase 2, and increased the size of the UFO waves that spawn. To help maintain mission variety, the Cleaner Base mission has also been moved to near the beginning of Phase 2 and the first Terror Site now occurs a few weeks later.
As we've added lots more UFOs to the invasion waves, we also re-enabled the UFO Delegation system that we had been testing in Milestone 5 - once the player has completed two Crash Sites of a particular type of UFO, they are given a permanent +$200,000/month funding increase in exchange for handing over responsibility for capturing that UFO type (and the resources inside) to the local government.
This means the player must pay an Operations Point charge for each further Crash site of that type, adding a cost to the resources you would gain - making completing these extra Crash Sites a choice rather than an obligation. Players will also have the option to disable this system entirely if they want, but please remember a campaign is already 30+ missions with the system active!
Finally, we felt the research tree had some pacing issues, with too much Phase 1 and 2 and then not quite enough afterwards. We therefore pushed a few things later in the tech tree - most notably Gauss Weapons now being unlocked from the Abductor (Phase 3) rather than the Observer (Phase 2), and Plasma Explosives and Fusion Explosives also being pushed back.
The difficulty curve may be a bit messed up after these changes, so please do give us feedback on where it still feels rough!
Strategy Layer:
Dropships now carry 8/10/12 soldiers, not 9/12/16. Final mission and base defence missions still allow 16 soldiers.
Geoscape Supporters now take 5 days to replace if eliminated, and cannot be recruited until they have been replaced. The Supporter panel now shows if Supporters are in the replacing state, and also provides additional information about the effects of Infiltrators.
UFO Delegation system becomes active on completion of two Crash Sites / Land Sites for a particular type of UFO. At that point, further Crash Sites of that type are "delegated" to the local government. This has the following effects:
Player gains +$200,000 per month funding.
Player must pay an Operations Point cost to complete further Crash Sites for that type of UFO (the cost is higher for larger UFO types).
Player still receives the cash bounty for not completing a Crash Site once that UFO type has been delegated.
Battleship UFOs and the various UFOs that create Wreckage rather than Crash Sites (e.g. Probe, Fighter, etc) are not affected by this system.
Autopsy and Observation research projects now require the appropriate captured / dead alien item to complete, and if you sell those items before completing the research then it'll disappear from the research options. Autopsies will consume 1 corpse to complete, whereas the Observation is non-lethal and does not kill the captured unit (which fits with the existing research text). Note that it's now no longer possible to unlock the Autopsy simply by completing the Observation given the alien is still alive.
The Alloys / Alenium granted by individual UFOs has been slightly reduced.
North America region bonus now grants newly recruited soldiers +5 in all attributes (reduced from +10).
Various changes have been made that affect the Doomsday Counter in Phase 1:
Infiltrators now vary in number based on difficulty
Elite Supporters now only cause +1 Doomsday per day
Fixed a bug where most Scout UFOs and Destroyer UFOs were not reducing Doomsday when shot down.
Cleaner Base has been pushed back into Phase 2, and replaced with an Abduction mission.
Rescue Soldiers mission has returned. The soldiers to be rescued no longer carry a Briefcase of Money, but are now also equipped with a Medikit.
Removed the Cleaner Soldiers from the first Abduction Site (as it occurs shortly before the Rescue Soldiers mission where you fight a whole team of Cleaner Soldiers).
Replaced the Sectons in the second Abduction Site with Mantids.
Cleaner Leader Elimination mission has been made slightly easier by giving the enemies weaker weapons.
Research & Engineering Changes:
Gauss Weapons research is now unlocked from Advanced Alloys (Abductor).
Fusion Weapons research is now unlocked from Ultradense Alloys (Harvester).
Guardian: Protection engineering project now unlocks from Advanced Alloys (Abductor).
Gauss Weapons now have a +damage upgrade engineering project that unlocks from Alien Fusion Weapons (roughly Cruisers onwards).
Alien Psi-Amp has been removed from Psyon Officers / Leaders. The Mind Shield now unlocks either from a captured Psyon, or a dead / captured Eternal.
Fusion Autorifle upgrade now needs Gauss Autorifle as a prerequisite.
Fusion Grenade upgrade now needs Alenium Grenades as a prerequisite.
Base Structure Changes:
Medical Center - reduced survival chance bonus to 20% (from 25%)
Surgical Center - reduced survival chance bonus to 30% (from 35%)
Air Combat Layer:
The new "paired slot" system means different aircraft have different slots available. While all aircraft have four weapon slots, equipping a cannon / lance requires using up an entire paired slot, and Angels now only have one of them!
Angel: 1 paired weapon slot, 2 unpaired weapon slots, 1 equipment slot
Phantom: 2 paired weapon slots, 1 equipment slot
Gemini: 2 paired weapon slots, 2 equipment slots
Fuel consumption has been turned off in the air combat. We found this wasn't a very interesting mechanic - it didn't usually matter, and when it did matter there was often nothing you could do to mitigate it.
The retreat mechanics have been reverted to how they were in earlier versions of Xenonauts 2, meaning human aircraft must now reach the edge of the battlefield in order to retreat (pressing the retreat button causes them to fly towards the closest edge). However, this retreat area is relative to the position of the main UFO - which means you won't be able to escape if you have a faster UFO chasing your interceptor (and vice versa).
The relative retreat zones mean that UFOs can never escape by reaching the edge of the map. Enemies therefore use a "Hyperdrive charge" mechanic to retreat from combat - after a certain amount of time, they will finish charging their hyperdrives and jump away, ending the combat and respawning some distance away on the Geoscape. Given the player no longer suffers fuel constraints, this adds some element of time pressure back into the air combat.
It is now possible for weapons to be able to target missiles. The only weapon capable of this is currently on the Defender UFO, but we may introduce additional weapons with this capacity in future updates.
Combatants now fly more realistic paths in the air combat, maintaining their intended speed unless they are behind a target and are firing at them (this will cause them to try and match speeds with their target). Previously units would behave strangely if moving to a destination behind them - rather than maintaining speed and banking to turn around, they would attempt to slow down to their minimum speed and rotate on the spot. The new behaviour should look more natural.
Combatant Changes:
Geoscape and Air Combat speeds for UFOs and interceptors have been unified, meaning many of the larger UFOs are now significantly faster in the air combat.
Gemini interceptor now equipped with a short-range teleportation device, allowing it to perform short teleport jumps instead of evasive rolls. These move the interceptor instantaneously, and travel further and recharge faster than normal evasive rolls.
The Evasive Roll now travels 25% further on the Phantom than the Angel.
Scout / Fighter UFOs now have significantly increased turn acceleration (i.e. how quickly they reach their maximum turn speed), making them much more agile in a dogfight.
Tactical Combat:
General:
If a soldier has reduced Time Units due to being over their carrying capacity, dropping those items now immediately refunds those lost TU.
Soldiers now gain progress points in Bravery if they suffer a Mind Control attack, and additional points if the attack was successful.
We've made a number of fixes and improvements to the AI, and it's possible this has made the game a little more difficult.
The AI now considers visibility of potential targets when throwing grenades, so units they cannot see will not be factored into their decision about whether to use a grenade and where to throw it. This should stop them lobbing grenades over walls at Xenonauts they've never actually seen.
The AI will no longer mind control civilians.
Alien Changes:
Secton - the Psyon mind link now causes Sectons to be suppressed when a Psyon is killed, rather than forcing them to panic / flee / berserk.
Servitor - these will now do one big heal at the end of a burst of shots, rather than healing after each individual hit.
Sebillians - Accuracy reduced by -5.
Sebillians - early game Sebillians now have +5HP.
Equipment changes:
Shotguns have been reduced in Accuracy by about 10%, as they were deadly even at quite long range when used by high-Accuracy soldiers (they still have good Hit Chance at close range due to their high proximity bonus).
Guardian Armour now provides 18 / 36 Armour, reduced from 20 / 40.
Colossus Armour now provides 50 / 80 Armour, increased from 40 / 70.
Laser weapons can no longer cause Bleeding Wounds.
Advanced Medikit upgrade project now also reduces Medikit weight to 20 (from 25).
Increased range on Electroshock Rifle to 16 (from 12), and increased ammo capacity to 8 (from 3).
Mission Changes:
UOO Sabotage Mission - we've removed the optional objective to destroy the reactor, as this was hard to track and left a lot of people confused.
Abduction - turn timer increased by +1 turn from day 60 onwards.
Abduction - destroyed abduction tubes no longer count as "abducted", meaning it's now more beneficial to destroy an abduction tube rather than let the aliens abduct the person inside.
Terror Site - these now have a consistent number of aliens bombs, so grant a consistent amount of Alenium as a reward.
Crash Site / Landed UFOs - significantly increased the HP of UFO doors, but set them to start damaged if the UFO has been shot down. They should therefore visually match the damaged / undamaged state of the hull better, and be much tougher to breach if the UFO has landed.
Alien Base Mission - we've removed the destructible earth tiles between rooms in the Alien Base missions, as they were causing a lot of bugs and gameplay problems (they're still used whenever we have thick wall sections inside a larger room, but you can't tunnel your way between rooms any more).
Blast Doors in the Xenonaut Base Defence / ATLAS Base / Cleaner Base missions are now much tougher.
USABILITY & CONTENT UDPATES:
General Options:
The graphics settings for the game have been overhauled - we've removed a number of visual settings that previously made no difference to performance and set up some new graphic quality presets based on the things that do. We've also added brightness / contrast / gamma sliders.
Based on community feedback, we've split the Ambient sound volume slider into two separate sliders for Ambient Sounds (background ambience like wind, bird calls, etc) and Environmental Sounds (sound emitted from objects in the game world, like fire tiles or vehicle engines, etc).
Strategy Layer:
Geoscape: Added new research artwork for Ultradense Alloys, Cleaner Device, Singularity Core and Defender UFO research projects.
Geoscape: When a plane reaches a waypoint, clicking Center on Aircraft now correctly sets time to the lowest speed.
Geoscape: The mission debrief panel now lists "Enemies Killed" rather than "Aliens Killed" (as not all hostile units are aliens).
Launch Aircraft: This panel has been visually updated, and now shows a pop-up when you hover over an aircraft that displays the full weapon loadout and stats of the aircraft.
Launch Aircraft: You can now right-click the images of aircraft in the squadron to quickly unassign them from the squadron.
Launch Aircraft: Trying to add a plane to the squadron in a different location will now clear the existing squadron and add the plane, whereas previously it simply threw an error sound and ignored the command.
Engineering / Xenopedia: Added a small orange "unread" circle next to categories / projects that the player has not seen before.
Engineering: Corpses are now automatically marked as Junk items once you have completed the appropriate Corpse Analysis projects.
Aircraft: the existing Hardpoint system (the blue numbers on weapons) has now been replaced by a "Paired Slot" system. Aircraft weapon slots are now either individual slots (which can hold one small weapon) or paired slots, which can hold either two small weapons or one large weapon. This is much easier to understand than the Hardpoint system and allows additional differentiation between interceptor types.
Aircraft: You can now edit the loadout of aircraft that are still under construction.
Aircraft: Items now play a sound when equipped.
Aircraft: Tooltips for aircraft / UFO weapons now display the projectile speed.
Air Combat:
Hovering the mouse over an aircraft information panel will now highlight the corresponding aircraft with a selection circle, making it much faster to identify which plane is which.
Evasive Roll buttons and weapon tiles now show a progress bar, giving a visual indication of how long until that weapon is reloaded or evasive roll becomes available again.
We've added a "throttle lock" button that allows you to override your interceptor's automatic speed adjustments. If this is enabled, setting a manual speed will lock that speed - it will not be changed if you set a new target, or if the aircraft gets behind a target and begins shooting at them.
Aircraft speed in the UI now displays the current speed of the aircraft. Previously it was displaying the intended speed (which was already shown on the throttle).
During the pre-interception deployment phase, aircraft speed now updates immediately if you adjust the throttle (in actual battle it takes time to accelerate / decelerate to the new speed).
Fixed an issue where multiple missiles fired from a single aircraft / UFO at the same time would just visually stack on top of each other and look like a single missile. They now correctly offset and look like a volley of missiles instead.
Tactical Combat:
Role icons for your soldiers are now shown under the minitabs at the top of the UI (there's a setting to disable them if you want).
All building roofs should now fully support destruction.
Move paths, worldspace UI elements, projectiles and obstruction shading are no longer hidden by the shroud.
The information in the shot accuracy calculation element (in the bottom right of the UI) has been standardised, making it clearer which modifiers are additive and which are multiplicative.
Psyons and the Eternal now perform an animation when performing a psionic attack.
Improved the camera tracking during the alien turn when aliens are shooting between different height levels.
Explosion logic has been optimised to prevent the game briefly locking up while calculating grenade/rocket explosions.
An icon is shown underneath the soldier minitab if that soldier is mind controlled, and you can no longer click that minitab to center the camera on that soldier.
Lots of animation updates:
Units with jetpacks or capable of hovering now use the appropriate floating animation when jumping or falling down levels.
Units that don't have run animations (MARS, Servitor, Cyberdrone, Eternal, etc) now move at a much more consistent speed when moving.
Removed a lot of unnecessary pauses during animations for hovering units, e.g. Mentarch, Servitor etc.
We've made various updates to the two UOO missions:
There's now some "teleporter" background art shown for these missions on the soldier equip screen (in place of the dropship).
UOO Sabotage mission now has a proper 3D background asset, showing the lower levels of the space station hull.
UOO Sabotage mission now has unique objectives text that refers to alien consoles etc, rather than using the same text as the Cleaner Data Raid.
UOO Bridge Assault mission now plays a "teleport" effect around each Xenonaut soldier at the start and end of the mission.
UOO Bridge Assault mission now has a fade-out sequence and sound effect to represent the successful destruction of UOO-1.
We've improved the Operation Endgame ending sequence so the camera centres on the High Eternal, before fading to black and playing a cinematic (currently starting cinematic). You no longer have to load back into strategy mid-way through the process.
Game now slightly delays the mission end if you knock the final enemy unconscious, giving us time to display the corresponding popup.
Objects inside the UFO no longer reveal their position and stopping chance if you do a fire path through the UFO from outside the hull.
Audio is now always played for visible objects when you move the camera over them. Previously it would only be played if there was a soldier within a certain radius, but this logic is now only applied to shrouded objects (preventing players hearing unseen objects from across the map).
There's now a reveal region at the back of the Pegasus dropship so you don't need to check behind it at the start of every mission.
Units no longer spawn blood pools on the ground when moving through tiles of poison gas.
Fixed various shadow problems that existed in the Stable version of the game, where the shadows for UFOs and a handful of other props would be hard-edged shapes rather than a gentle gradient.
The non-heavy versions of the Warden Armour and Guardian Armour no longer display a helmet in the tactical combat.
Symbiote Rifle now has proper 2D inventory art and a 3D model.
ARES now has an appropriate UI portrait "head" rather than an old MARS image.
Added new Mentarch / Servitor / Cyberdrone movement sounds.
Added sound effects for units crouching / uncrouching.
BUGFIXES
General:
Fixed Operation Points incorrectly being referred to as "Command Points" in the new campaign settings.
Any "stuck" sound effects should now be cleared when you transition between strategy / tactical combat, or the Main Menu screen.
Strategy Layer:
Fixed weapon upgrade projects causing airborne aircraft to lose their ammo when their weapon was upgraded.
Fixed the "Iceland Incident" Xenopedia project (the one with the EXDEF interview transcript) not correctly unlocking after you complete the Cleaner Device research.
Base Defence missions now correctly allow you to use Wounded soldiers (below 50% health).
Fixed a bug where the hitbox for any multi-UFO squadron would become misaligned after loading a save game.
Fixed the soldier list resetting its sort order after recruiting soldiers.
Fixed an issue where aircraft armour plating values were sometimes not calculating correctly.
Nanofabrication research should now unlock when the dropship gets home after completing an Alien Base mission, not immediately after winning the mission.
Fixed the Region Bonus popup sometimes showing the incorrect information string.
Fixed some locations displaying the Geoscape clock using periods rather than semicolons.
Air Combat:
Fixed the Observer UFO getting visually deformed after performing an Evasive Roll.
Fixed air combat burst-fire weapons continuing to fire the remainder of the burst at interceptors even if they escape the fire arc of the weapon.
Tactical Combat:
Fixed a lot of visual issues in various maps and for various terrain objects.
Fixed a number of AI hangs.
Fixed various AI behaviours.
Fixed another map that would get stuck at 90% loading.
Fixed an issue where stunning the High Eternal would not successfully complete Operation Endgame.
Fixed an issue where the camera would sometimes forcibly continue to track a moving soldier even if you'd tried to manually take control of the camera.
Fixed a bug where destroyed shipping containers would still block grenade throws (even though the grenade showed a 100% chance to hit its intended target).
Fixed grenades being unable to pass through destroyed building roofs.
Fixed disabling "Allow Overwatch Friendly Fire" option not working correctly.
Fixed the bug where UFOs would be revealed from the shroud without the player having any vision on them during night missions.
Fixed units being able to perform reaction fire before they fell after having the floor below them destroyed.
Fixed an issue where evacuating civilians would only move one tile at a time when on the edge of the map.
Fixed an issue where only 11 "enemy visible" icons would be shown, even if more enemies were visible.
Fixed damage numbers sometimes being visible in the shroud.
Fixed Alien Base missions not revealing the map correctly if you controlled the command room, but an alien had entered the space underneath the control room.
Fixed dead aliens (killed during the crash) sometimes incorrectly spawning inside the walls of UFOs.
Fixed an issue where live aliens could spawn inside the wall of a Battleship UFO on a certain map.
Fixed an issue where Crushing units could walk through an open alien door and crush the doorway without also destroying the door.
Fixed various issues with the movement path preview UI element, including some missing / incorrectly orientated tiles.
Fixed the alien mainframe on the UOO Bridge Assault mission still displaying the interact cursor on hover once it has been interacted with.
Fixed zombified civilians still showing the "evacuate" interact cursor on mouse hover.
Abduction tubes that have been opened or have teleported away no longer appear as cover to the mouse cursor.
Fixed a few shroud tiles around the Battleship UFO not being revealable.
Fixed dead Reapers continuing to play their idle audio sound.
Fixed blood splatters remaining hovering in the air if the floor tiles beneath them were destroyed.
Fixed the game creating a broken save game on completion of the second part of ENDGAME.
Fixed soldiers being invisible in the UOO Bridge Assault mission if you load the start of mission save.
Fixed a bug where Mind Controlled soldiers would be recovered after a failed mission, even if outside the extraction zone.
Fixed the Tactical Vest in the tactical inventory being renamed "Belt" the first time you change soldier.
Fixed another example of the Alien Base command room upper level having incorrectly destructible walls.
Fixed various buildings in Ambush missions that were missing deployment regions on the upper levels.
Various fixes to missing / incorrect tiles in various maps.