VERSION: V12 NEW FEATURES:
Female Soldiers: Female soldiers now spawn in the game, with female portraits and names. We need to do a little more work on harmonising some of the female portraits with the male ones (different artist) but overall the system has been pretty successful.
Custom Soldiers: Pre-generated soldiers (from Kickstarter) have been partially implemented. In the standard build the two pre-generated soldiers are myself and Kris Thaler (one of our artists) but you can view 15 other test soldiers drawn from the ranks of the highest Kickstarter backers in the debug version of the game. Unfortunately, playing the normal version will lead to you seeing a lot of me / Kris for now, as we’re the only two options when a pregenerated soldier spawns (10% of the time)!
Base Defence modules: These are defensive turrets constructed as base structures in your base. They fire upon attacking UFOs when aliens perform base attack missions on that base. If the UFO is not destroyed, the damage dealt will reduce the size of the attacking force.
Androns: These alien units now spawn in their earliest two incarnations. We’ve put them in the Quick Battle too. Basically they don’t act that differently to normal troops at the moment, other than being very tough, but as the AI becomes more advanced they’ll behave in a fairly unique way compared to the other species. There’s a bit more variety there anyway.
Dropship Destruction: It’s no longer effectively game over when you have your dropship shot down, as your soldiers can now survive a crash and be rescued by local forces. Troops now have a better than average chance of surviving a crash, but are likely to suffer injury while doing so.
Alien Bases: The tiles for these aren’t in place yet, but the code is now tested and in place. Bases are created on the Geoscape by alien construction missions, and all bases (existing and future) grow in size at predetermined AI ticker levels to scale with the invasion. There are two victory conditions in the base missions, either killing all aliens in the base (captures all equipment) or destroying the base power cores and aborting the mission (captures only the equipment brought out with you). Either instance results in the destruction of the alien base.
Suppression: The suppression system has been added to the game for preliminary testing. A unit becomes suppressed when enough bullets have been fired at him, with burst fire causing more suppression than single shots. The values are preliminary at the moment, as is the “suppressed” icon (a blue triangle with an S on it). Let us know your thoughts on this system though.
Heavy weapons: These have a 30% accuracy reduction if you move and shoot in the same turn (turning does not count as moving). The machinegun, rocket launcher and sniper rifle are the starting “heavy” weapons.
Mission Scoring: The mission-end scoring system has been updated. It now has different scoring for different mission types and different outcomes (victory / loss /abort) along with some tweaked values. This means the score awarded at the end of a mission should better reflect the actual outcome.
Soldier Hire: When you hire a soldier, you can now pick from a pool of 12 possible soldiers which is refreshed as you hire troops. This allows you to pick a soldier that suits the role you are hiring them for - though fired troops go back in the soldier pool to prevent mass hire / fire soldier cherry picking.
Manufacturing Materials: Most manufacturable items will consume either Alenium or Alien Alloys when built now. There’s no UI element that shows these requirements at present (that’ll be in the redesigned UI) but it’ll give you a pop-up if you don’t have enough.
Dropship Vehicle Icon: Vehicles on a dropship now have an icon on the Soldier Equip screen to show that they’re filling soldier slots.
New tiles: The Town tileset has had some new tiles added to it. There is now a set of tiles for a bank /office building that will be the first thing we get our dedicated level designer to play with, and the house walls have now been painted over, along with the house props and the shop interior props. This means they look nicer and have the visible destructibility in place now too as they have damaged / destroyed variants.
Launcher: This has been changed so it no longer has a Pre-Order link or refers to the game as a “Demo” (this was only to test the Kickstarter build). This should stop any future confusion arising where people buy the game and think they only have the demo version!
Reapers: These are the Xenonaut equivalent of Chryssalids. You won’t see them until the beta, but they are fully rendered, animated and I saw one zombify my troops for the first time a few days ago. Thought you might want to know!
BALANCE TWEAKS:
Overkill Percentage: The overkill percentage for UFOs (i.e how much damage they can take beyond 100% and still leave a crash site) has been increased to 130% from 115%.
UFO Behaviours: UFOs now fly in a straight line for longer before changing direction. This means they are both easier to intercept and look a bit more intelligent.
Geoscape Invasion Escalation: This has been smoothed out. There should be more UFOs at the start of the game, but their numbers should increase more slowly than before. There should also be less fighters relative to before.
Scout UFOs: These are now more dangerous at close range, but their weapons have a shorter overall range. The counter is intended to be a MiG with 4 Sidewinders, which will kill them from beyond their range and only take minor damage in the process.
Hidden Movement Camera: The Hidden Movement camera now focuses correctly on events during the alien turn. You shouldn’t have your units killed by enemy fire without seeing it now. It should also track long range shot impacts better than before.
Wounded Soldiers: The Soldier Development screen now correctly shows the HP of wounded soldiers at the end of the battle, rather than their modified maximum HP (after the damage) as it did before. It should also differentiate between Injured (can still participate in missions) and Wounded (confined to bed) soldiers.
BUGFIXES:
Geoscape:
The “Abort Mission” menu option is no longer incorrectly called “Abort Game”.
Funding money now comes in before wages and maintenance go out at the end of each month.
Alenium and other manufactured missiles should now be consumed when fired in combat.
UFOs now despawn correctly if they create a terror site.
Grounded UFOs will no longer be named “Crashsite-XX”.
Wounded soldiers will be moved to the Unassigned category on the Soldier Equip screen after recovering above 50% health.
Aircraft destroyed in transfer from base to base will no longer block hangars up after their destruction.
The Xenopedia is no longer visible in the background on other base screens in some circumstances.
The base selector icons should now be visible in all circumstances.
Ground combat:
Xenonaut reaction fire is now functional again.
Machineguns now reaction fire with burst fire.
Turning on the spot no longer triggers alien reaction fire.
Aliens are no longer able to reaction fire in directions that they are not facing.
Crouching soldiers now use a crouched injury animation rather than playing the standing injury animation.
The “Alien Spotted” icon will appear when viewing any camera level, rather than only on the level of the alien.
Destroying the vans on the industrial tileset will no longer crash the game.
Swapping weapons no longer reloads the clip in the weapon.
The neutral AI will no longer just spin on the spot several times per turn.
The crash caused by destroying a window and killing a unit at the same time has been fixed.
