Xenonauts 2 - Development Update

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A new development update for Xenonauts 2:

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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!