Happy New Year and all that! Here's a quick update from the Goldhawk team on work that took place in December - this was a slightly short month owing to team holidays but we're back and on track now.
Morale Boost
The main focus of recent work has been the soldier Morale system which causes soldiers to panic when things go horribly wrong on a mission. We actually planned not to include this in Xenonauts 2 for quite a while, but ultimately we felt the game would be weaker without it and not having it gives us fewer tools when it comes to designing the alien abilities (particularly psionic ones). This system is mostly now implemented but there's still quite a few bugs and edge cases we're working through.
We've made a few improvements relative to the first Xenonauts. The first is that Morale always starts at 100 for every soldier, and the Bravery of a soldier (boosted by the squad commander bonus) reduces the amount of Morale damage taken when something bad happens (a soldier with 0 Bravery takes about 3x the morale damage that soldier with 100 Bravery does). There's now a button that allows you to spend TU in order to gain Morale, and the morale system is a bit more sensible in general. Units are generally only vulnerable to panic if Xenonaut soldiers are dying around them (particularly high-ranking ones) or the unit itself has been wounded, or if there are psionic aliens messing with their heads.
Balancing is still required but overall it should be a little smoother and easier to understand than it was in Xenonauts 1.
Ongoing Art
Work on the updated UI designs and final art assets also continues. We've done an updated layout for the tactical combat UI due to the fact that we added several new features since our current design was done, including the Morale system which now needs to be displayed somewhere.
Our UI artist is working on styling that at the moment, and in the meantime we've finished styling several more of the strategy panels. Work on the 3d models for the human civilians and alien armour variants also continues.
Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or the Steam community if you have any questions.