#XENONAUTS BASE DESTROYED HOW TO#
#XENONAUTS BASE DESTROYED UPDATE#

Sentry Guns: we've added Sentry Guns to the game.

Aircraft Power System: aircraft equipment now has power requirements, which makes equipping your aircraft a bit more interesting.

This means the process of moving from the single-base design to the multi-base design is now fully complete.

Separated Base Stores: each base now has fully independent storage space, as they did in X-Com or X1.

The idea is that they'll cause the Xenonauts problems in the early game, but the player can complete a short research chain and a few tactical missions to remove them as a threat so they can concentrate fully on the aliens. The Cleaners are a shadowy organisation of gas-mask wearing humanoids that have been working to assist the aliens (and foil the Xenonauts) for some time prior to the start of the game.

Cleaners: we've added a new 'alien' race to the start of the game.

As alien weapons can't be used by humans anyway, I think this works well to give the player a reward after each battle (as you always get some components, even if you don't get alloys or alenium) and makes some of the engineering choices in the early game a bit more interesting.

Weapon Components: you no longer recover alien weapons from combat (because they self-destruct), but instead you recover components that can be spent on upgrades or constructing advanced weapons - if you've played XCOM it's a similar system to their 'weapon fragments'.

These systems will be re-enabled and properly evaluated once it's possible to play a 20 mission campaign, as that way we can judge what sort of effect they have on the gameplay and strategy. Geocape command centers (scientists / engineers are now hired in the same way as they were in X1).

Systems Temporarily Disabled: I've temporarily disabled some of the new systems to make gameplay balancing easier, making the game more like the classic X-Com experience.

Not perfect, but I think it's playable now. The early game is therefore now much better balanced than in previous builds. The first campaigns would only last two or three missions before the game would crash or become unplayable, whereas the more recent campaigns are 10+ mission sessions that probably cover at least a third of the game.

Gameplay Rebalance: I've probably played 20 campaigns of Xenonauts 2 since the last build was released, and I've been fixing gameplay issues and iterating the game balance with each one.

I've made so many changes that I've not kept track of them (there's been literally hundreds of them), so instead this post will just give an overview of some of the largest changes. The downside is that I added / changed a few new game mechanics as part of my playtesting and these are not currently very well explained, so you may not really know what's going on!

The result is that the gameplay in the early game is now properly starting to take shape. I returned to work earlier this month and have been working hard on playtesting and balancing the game - doing campaign run-throughs and changing the game balance / iterating the mechanics after each one.

#XENONAUTS BASE DESTROYED UPDATE#

This is our first major update for about two months, as I've had to take some time off due to a recent death in the family.

#XENONAUTS BASE DESTROYED HOW TO#

Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch so you'll need to switch over to get this update ( instructions on how to do that here). Closed Beta Build V19 has now been released on Steam and GOG.

Xenonauts base destroyed